Your Planet Needs You
Elizabeth Laird & Will McDowall, illustrated by Paul Boston
Walker Books

After an exceptionally hot summer like the one we’ve been experiencing in the UK, few can deny our climate is changing. News about extreme weather conditions and temperatures that have reached highs like never before sound alarming. This we read, is largely due to the increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere thanks to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation throughout the world.

However, despite the huge challenges we humans face, people the world over are inventing real-world solutions to help deal with the problems and children can find out about many of these from this book that presents a broad range of green careers.
Several of these involve the use of wind power, which is clean as carbon is not released into the air. If you are specially interested in engineering you could perhaps become a wind turbine engineer or a turbine service engineer; you’ll need a head for heights to undertake the latter as to repair a wind turbine entails being dropped from a helicopter on top of the turbine in question and then climbing down inside to fix the problem. Alternatively, a driving expert could be employed to transport the massive turbine blades to hilltops. There are even roles such as captaining a ship taking turbines out to set them up in the sea.

Other areas offer roles in looking after nature, including marine conservation, creative fashion design,

sustainable farming and more.

I suspect there will be jobs nobody’s ever thought of as yet, but this inspiring book offers an engaging, accessible way to open up discussions around climate change and how anyone and everyone can help. It’s pitch perfect for KS2 classes, especially to support the area of environmental education.