The mission of the iCREST Foundation is to enrich the ecosystem of environmental education providers by convening leaders of these organizations to collaborate, explore partnerships, share resources, and support each other’s work thereby enhancing their capacity to reach and impact youth. As the global environmental crisis becomes more prevalent, disruptive, and painful to societies, the urgency to create a generation of engaged, environmentally aware, and concerned and active community members has never been so crucial.
We envision a world where youth are given the skills to understand and participate positively in the future they’re inheriting as a constructive alternative to eco-anxiety.
The iCREST concept was first conceived in 2014 by Drs. Bishop and Heller and then launched in 2016 as the education initiative of the International Centre for Earth Simulation (ICES) Foundation, whose founding principle is the symbiosis of science, society, and nature for the betterment of all life on Earth.
Established in 2010, the ICES Foundation set out its goal to integrate the vast pools of knowledge contained within today’s multitude of scientific and socio-economic specializations and to develop next generation ‘holistic’ modeling, simulation, and visualizations, aided by AI methods, that accurately depict the medium- and long-term future direction of planet Earth. This is a project for the common good that provides enhanced decision support and improved scientific underpinnings to our current and future policy-makers especially with respect to the global and local effects of climate change, extreme weather, wildfire, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, fresh water availability, food security, public health and safety, earthquake, tsunami, landslide, volcanic, industrial accident, geo-engineering, asteroid threats and other natural hazards, with the aim of developing early warning and disaster reduction and mitigation strategies.
From left to right – Dr. Bob Bishop (President and Founder of ICES), Dr. Tony Murphy (Former Director of the GLOBE Program), Dr. John Richards (Principal, Consulting Services for Education and Adjunct Professor, Harvard Grad School of Education), Dr. Lori R. Maxfield (Scholar in Residence, Carlow University), Dr. Dixon Butler (Founder of YLACES), Dr. Amanda Baker (science writer and outreach advocate), Dr. Elyse Eidman-Aadahl (Executive Director of the National Writing Project), Charlene Gaynor (Principal, Gaynor Growth Consultants and formerly CEO of the Association of Educational Publishers), Dr. Nelson B. Heller (Chairman and President of the iCREST Foundation), Dr. Hans-Peter Plag (Professor, Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Director, Mitigation and Adaptation Research Institute, Old Dominion University), and Jayde Lovell (host of ScIQ, a popular science channel on the TYT Network).
The iCREST initiative Education Advisory Board summit at the University of California at Berkeley, Faculty Club in February 2019.
From left to right – Dr. Tony Murphy (Former Director of the GLOBE Program), Dr. Hans-Peter Plag (Professor, Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Director, Mitigation and Adaptation Research Institute, Old Dominion University), Dr. Elyse Eidman-Aadahl (Executive Director of the National Writing Project), Dr. Dixon M. Butler (Founder of YLACES), Dr. Nelson B. Heller (Chairman and President of the iCREST Foundation, Dan Damelin (Senior Scientist at the Concord Consortium), Dr. Bob Bishop (President and Founder of ICES).
