Sustainability

“The UN has declared the period 2005-2014 as

the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development”

Why it is so important the word “Sustainability “? 

Sustainability? 

How can I define SUSTAINABILITY? Well, Green Facts webpage, define this word as a feature that is based on meeting the needs of present and local population without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

On the other hand, what we have to take into account is that a sustainable use of an ecosystem refers to humans make use of an ecosystem so that this produces a continuous benefit to present generations while retaining their potential to meet the needs and aspirations of future generations.

The truth is that when we had to describe SUSTAINABILITY at the beginning of the class as a warm-up activity, everything that came to my mind was related with how to take care of our environment, as well as how can we face the climate change, or how we can preserve natural resources. But although this word includes these ideas, I did not see Sustainability as a feature that goes beyond the time. It seems to me that sustainability has become important once government has noticed that something was not going well in the world, that’s why measures began to appear to make the world more sustainable, and to ensure themselves that for generations citizens will be aware about the importance of being sustainable.

Now it makes sense to me the second activity we did about writing five dreams we would like to achieve in the future. That’s why it is very important to bear in mind that if we all do not work together to make our globalized world more sustainable we will not be able to make our dreams come true, because before this happens maybe we have been damaging the planet to the point of almost destroying it.

At this point, I can talk about the importance of teachers’ role when talking about sustainability. As in every aspect of daily school life, teacher is a model for their students so the first thing we have to take into account is that we must profess by example. That means that we cannot try to make our students more aware about the Earth problems if we are not conscious about them; we cannot ask our pupils do sustainable actions to maintain our welfare society if we do not do anything for it. So it is not something about doing activities because we have to, it is doing activities because our pupils have to grow up being conscious about how an action can contribute to make our world a little bit better or a little bit worst; and also, how in this globalized world each action has a repercussion to third people who did not even know. 

Sustainability Workshop

To continue with my post I would like to mention that in this lesson we talked about ESD "Education for Sustainable Development". We can consider this kind of education as a lifelong learning process that leads to active future awareness, ethical consideration and critical thinking as Jens Arby explained us. However, I have wanted to mention this aspect briefly because I have found a Spanish company that has started to work on sustainability and has begun to implement a program based on sustainability in schools' classrooms.
You can find more information on the following webpage:

http://www.sostenibilidad.com/home

http://www.sostenibilidad.com/educacion.html

Finally, I have uploaded a video where it is defined the word sustainability, and where it is explained the situation in the Earth nowadays. From my point of view, this video represents in a simple way how world have been changing, how people have been destroying it and how people must act to keep our world sustainable.
SMALL CHANGES = BIG GAINS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5NiTN0chj0

SUSTAINABILITY CORE CONCEPTS

ESD: means “Education for Sustainable development” allows each person to acquire the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values ​​necessary to achieve a sustainable future.

Education for sustainable development means incorporating the fundamental issues of sustainable development in teaching and learning, for example, climate change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity, poverty reduction and sustainable consumption.

GREEN ECONOMY: is the science that studies the relationships between the natural and the social and economic systems. These studies include work on finding a solution to the conflicts between economic growths, physical and biological limits of ecosystems because the environmental burden of the economy increases with consumption and population growth.

RENEWABLE ENERGY: are those that produce electricity from the sun, wind and water. They are inexhaustible sources but still present difficulties in storage and are less efficient because they have little power installations and the production cost is high.