6,000 enter Green School Awards
The Green School Awards have now ended for 2007-8. More than 200 projects were entered into the Awards and around 6,000 young people participated in the projects. Judging has now taken place and winners have been informed.
Peter Littlewood, YPTE's Director said 'The entries in this year's competition have been amazing. It was so difficult to choose the winners because there was so much great work submitted. I would like to thank all the schools that got involved and would encourage you all to take part again next year.'
The Award's sponsors, TOTAL, have confirmed their intention to continue the competition in 2008-9. New materials for teachers will be available from this website during the summer holidays, but all categories etc. will remain unchanged. The Awardswill remain for groups of up to 30 young people aged 7-11, are designed to help teachers bring the environment into a wide range of subjects and to span the primary curriculum. There are 20 prizes of at least £500 available for schools and every child who enters will receive a prize. Click here to find out more!
Conservation Education is back!
After a long absence caused by our office move, Conservation Education is back with a new issue for the Spring Term. This time it's on How Animals Move and it's a really exciting and informative issue. You can download it from our downloads page by choosing it from the drop-down list, or click here.
Sleepwalking towards disaster?
As a species, we humans are fast becoming victims of our success. According to the recently published UN Global Outlook report, there are already too many of us, and the planet is already unable to sustain the human population. This is a situation that is currently getting worse, so why aren't we more worried?
The fact is that life here in the UK has not changed much for us yet. Yes, we had bad floods back in June, we didn't really have a summer at all, except for a week or two in April, but at the moment, not much else has happened to suggest environmental catastrophe for us. But it looks certain that big changes are on the way, and it's not surprising when you look at the figures!
The world's population has increased by one third in the last twenty years alone. There are now 6.7 billion people on the planet. By the end of 2007, more of them will live in cities than in rural areas, the first time this has ever happened in the history of humanity. Some cities have grown enormously, for example Las Vegas has grown from about 550,000 inhabitants in 1985 to around 1.7 million by 2004. This kind of growth puts massive pressure on natural resources like water.
As a species, we are pumping out about one third more carbon dioxide than we did twenty years ago, despite all the talk about climate change and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Ice cores have shown that current levels of carbon dioxide and methane (two of the main greenhouse gases) are higher than they have been at any time for the last 500,000 years. In the coming century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) global temperatures will increase by 1.8 to 4 degrees centigrade.
This will lead to major changes to the planet's water, including altered rainfall patterns around the world and rises in global sea levels. Both of these threats will affect millions of people. Areas of low rainfall are likely to see even less rain, meaning that parts of Africa in particular will be severely affected by drought. Rising seas will mean that many low-lying cities will potentially be underwater in the next few hundred years.
Here in the UK, the changes we will definitely be affected. Evidence suggests that the Gulf Stream (a deep sea current of warm water that flows up from the south) is already slowing and may stop altogether as more and more ice melts in the Arctic. This will mean that although the planet's temperature will increase, here in the UK it will actually get colder!
Rising sea levels will threaten low-lying areas and the much touted flood of London might actually happen. We will almost certainly see more rainfall, meaning yet more flooding, and we will probably have to get used to many more violent storms and freak weather incidents than we have seen so far.
As things stand, over 1.7 billion people (1,700 million) around the world will not have good access to drinking water by 2025. We should be OK here in the UK, but that pressure on water supplies is probably going to mean more immigration to countries where good drinking water is plentiful, including the UK. Whilst that's not a bad thing in itself, it does mean that our resources will start to be more stretched and that our islands will be more crowded than ever.
And according to the report, overcrowding is another big problem. We only have about a fifth of the land on the planet's surface per person now that we had in 1900 (1.63 hectares per person now, 7.91 hectares in 1900). To make ourselves more room, we are busy cutting down forests at a rate of 50,000 square kilometres a year. The habitat destruction caused by this already threatens an estimated 16,000 species with extinction.
We can't afford to ignore the facts. Humans have been too successful at colonising the planet at the expense of other species and if we don't take action now to curb our overuse of the world's resources, we will be sowing the seeds of our own extinction.
Young people of today are going to be affected by many of these changes, so it's vital that they learn about how they can make a difference. It's clear that we cannot continue leaving things as they are. We need to make changes to our lives for the benefit of the planet, but also to save ourselves.
Action has to be concerted and global. We can make a difference here in the UK and we should do all we can to help, both at government and corporate levels, but also as individuals (and it's here that young people can really get involved) starting now. However, if the rest of the world doesn't join us in taking action, we will only be slightly putting off the inevitable.
