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Education
for Sustainable Development Background
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Island
Environment Watch:
A New Tool for Education for Sustainable Island Living
Background
There
are a number of outreach initiatives, some in progress for several
years, that seek to empower citizens, and especially youth, to
act for positive environmental and social change. Among the successful
tools are ones that focus on a practical approach to the measurement
of environmental change by schools and communities, who then use
the information to address issues that they identify at a local
level. Such initiatives include the Sandwatch project (UNESCO-sponsored)
that focuses on beaches, the River Care project (sponsored by
Live and Learn Environmental Education Inc.) that focuses on rivers,
and the Chemistry Outreach to Schools (COTS), University of the
South Pacific initiative that focuses on weather and waste. Each
of these initiatives has had successes in their local area, ranging
from persuading a sugar factory to reduce the contaminants dumped
in a river (River Care in Fiji) to involving a coastal community
in the clearance of a blocked drain and beautification of a coastal
area (Sandwatch in St. Vincent and the Grenadines) and to encouraging
school science clubs to monitor weather and village communities
to embark on a 'Clean X" project (COTS Program, USP, Fiji).
Such
activities are very significant at a local level, but the question
always arises - how to broaden the impact so that they become
really significant and visible over a larger area? A simple answer
is for the different initiatives to join forces and work together.
Proposal
The
key idea behind this proposal is networking activities and different
groups working together within a geographical framework.
Taking
a distinct geographic area such as a district, a parish or a watershed,
different groups would undertake to monitor specific aspects of
environmental change, for example, weather observations, waste
management, land clearing and sediment runoff, river pollution,
mangrove health, beach littering. Each group could work individually,
collecting information about the changes over time, identifying
issues, and undertaking activities to address the issues; but
there would also be opportunities for the groups to interact with
each other to discuss and exchange experiences and possibly also
to collaborate with each others activities.
This
is essentially a school and community-based approach. So methods
adopted for monitoring environmental changes must be simple, low
cost (or no-cost) and sustainable. This is not an academic programme,
rather it is a case of helping ordinary people help themselves
by collecting the necessary information and using it to enhance
their neighbourhoods and to make their own individual lives, and
those of their children, better. (Such methods already exist for
most, if not all, the ecosystem components - beaches, rivers,
weather and mangroves). A suggested approach would be to select
two or three islands in different regions where this concept could
be tried on a pilot basis in distinct geographical areas over
a 2-3 year period.
With
different activities, linked and focused in a specific geographical
area, the potential exists for significant impact that is likely
to amount to more than the sum of the individual components.
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