Hugging Trees, Reading the Climate

Today’s breakfast was like the previous ones — filled with jokes and laughter that brought our countries closer and closer. At the CEE campus, we toured a man-made forest. While hugging trees and brushing millipedes off ourselves, we learned to ground ourselves and pledged to plant trees once we returned home.

Monkeys were a huge highlight — although we learned they’re not here for any good reason. The trash pollution in India is what attracts them; they don’t eat what the forest provides, but still decide to hang out there. A small, uncomfortable lesson in how human waste reshapes even a forest.

This helped us see, understand and discover our different perspectives.

Back in the conference hall we had a quick review on climate change. We played an ice-breaker — standing or sitting depending on whether a prompt was about climate or weather — testing our comprehension. Then we did it again with prompts about action in response to climate change, agreeing or disagreeing, and surfacing how differently each of us sees the problem.