The picture with snow was taken outside of the Faculty of Education last year. The picture without the snow was taken at about the same time this year. Climate change is starting to really scare me, and I hope that we will be able to make the changes necessary in our daily lives to avert a humanitarian catastrophe.
This January, I went to Bangkok, Thailand to see how schools and universities are practicing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). You might not know this, but we are currently in the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD)which was declared by the United Nations. The objective of the DESD "is to integrate the principles, values, and practices of sustainable development into all aspects of education and learning." (I will blog about this later). For those of you unfamiliar with the term sustainable development, I would define it as national development that does not overuse natural resources or do irreparable damage to the earth.
In my university, I teach a class of 40 engineering and agricultural students. Maybe many of these students will be pioneers in creating new sustainable technologies in their fields! Since these students might be called upon to help solve some of the world's problems, I decided that we should learn what some of the world's problems are. I have asked students to go to the United Nations Human Development Report home page, find a world development statistic they find most startling, and report it as a comment to this post.
I have written the first comment to serve as an example.
