Kayleigh COB – Mercy College Waterford

Why as a team did you choose to focus on this challenge?

I decided to focus on climate change because I've been involved in a couple environmental aid groups before including global schools. It's an important issue to me so I feel I'd both enjoy doing this issue and find it really beneficial to learning more about it. I'm specifically doing the ocean as I find it really interesting and the think it's worth spending more time on it than other issues related to climate change as the ocean is so undiscovered

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What do you know now about the challenge that you didn't know before?

Something I think a lot of people realise but don’t recognise or pay much attention to because it’s something they’re causing and it would require them to change their ways, which they don’t want to do, but to answer, globally over 100 MILLION fish and other sea creatures (seabirds, sea turtles, mammals etc,) die every year because of plastic in the ocean whether it is from choking or ingesting it

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What have you learnt about your Hero?

My hero is the ocean, a challenge it faces is human involvement. Humanity has done so much damage to the ocean but some of the bigger issues specifically are overfishing, oil spills, carbon emission, chemical pollution noise pollution and plastic pollution.

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If you could improve one thing for your Hero what would that be?

I would improve how much people care, all of the issues it has would have been solved such a long time ago if people just cared more, we have our planner right now, we can go swimming right now and because WE can do things doesn’t mean the next generations will be able to, they don’t think about the animals or our children so they never tried that hard to fix anything

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Do you have any ideas for a potential solution? No matter how raw, share them with your Mentors for feedback.

This is very raw however I was thinking even just in local areas it could be possible to host short quizzes with questions such as the one I mentioned above (how many sea creatures die yearly and from what) I think if it was put into perspective like that for teenagers and younger children it’d be on their mind a lot more and they might feel inclined to talk about it, research about or even just think more about it and put an effort into helping out

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Ask your Mentor anything …. This is a chance to ask your Mentors a direct question relating to your Big Idea.

I’m honestly a little stuck, I don’t feel very confident in my uniform

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