Creating the ZWDP Mountain Beacon
“We are All Mountain People”
Idea and Aim
Beacons have been used for thousands of years as a signal to guide, warn and communicate between communities. They are very often placed in high locations where a fire is a message that can be passed from beacon to beacon, from community to community.
The idea of a mountain beacon is to raise awareness about mountain issues around the world through education for sustainable mountain development and global citizenship education. No matter how far we are away from the mountains our daily decisions and actions impact glaciers and the fragile mountain environment.
ZWDP with network school Freie Waldorfschule Sorsum established the first beacon in 2021. We are planning to build a ZWDP Mountain Beacon at each of our network schools ready for the COP31 Climate Conference in November 2026, and the UN Water Conference in December 2026.
ZWDP Mountain Torch
Idea and Aim
In 2025, during a visit to ZWDP network school Sant’Anatolia di Narco, as a part of events for UN International Year of Glaciers Preservation, Julian Fisher ZWDP Director met Venuste Niyongabo.
Venuste Niyongabo is a Burundian former long and middle-distance runner. In 1996, he became the first Olympic medalist from Burundi by winning the 5000 metres at the 1996 Summer Olympics.
Both Venuste and Julian wanted children and youth to have more meaningful and active engagement and participation in global policy making around planetary health and climate action.
The idea of the mountain torch came from Venuste who proposed the idea that students and schools could develop a mountain torch based on the olympic torch. A part of the education for sustainable mountain development < Water Towers Ambassador Programme > children / students would create their own torch from local materials.
The torch is used to light the mountain beacon of each ZWDP network school with a virtual ‘flame’ transmitted by social media to next ZWDP network school.
A school in the international conference hosting country would receive the final flame and light the school beacon.
The connected beacons would reinforce the FAO MPS childrens call to action and ZWDP education policy work for sustainable mountain development (Belem Issue Brief).
For the UN International Year of Glaciers Preservation, Venuste and a school in Burundi have been working on creating the first mountain torch ready for COP 31 and the UN Water Conference.