Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE) members in Asia gathered in Ahmedabad, India for the FEE Regional Network for Asia (FENA) meeting on 9 Jan 2025.
Chaired by Lesley Jones, FEE President, and hosted by Sanskriti Menon, from Centre for Environmental Education India and a FEE Board Member, the gathering took place at CEE’s headquarters where important discussions around the theme of sustainability action took place. Read Lesley Jones, FEE President’s reflections on the meeting!
There was recognition of the three big challenges facing us as a world, climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental pollution, and that we should be in no doubt that we are in a climate and nature emergency.
Climate change resilience and adaptation, nature restoration and talking environmental pollution are inextricably linked and should be embedded across the whole curriculum.
They should also be part of vocational training, teacher training and informal learning outside of the education system, in the workplace, for example.
The Greening Education Partnership is significant as the focus has shifted from input/process to outputs/outcomes. With challenging targets, it is an opportunity to gain support from governments and the private sector to green schools at scale.
Knowledge is not enough – we have to bridge the gap between knowledge and action. Behaviour is not changing, we need to make emotional connections through values and culture. We need to win hearts and minds.
“We need to learn from nature - there is no waste nature.”
We need to communicate our messages to all citizens and the importance of visual communication through pictures and objects was emphasised.
Young people have a critical part to play and we need to harness the power of social media as a force for good -create a mass movement.
We need to be better at sharing success/good practice to learn from what is making a positive difference and replicate.
The NGO sector needs to use their voice together to advocate and influence government and business to do the right thing. Need to focus on skills for green jobs – this is how business/industry will change.
In conclusion, the conference showcased many inspiring initiatives, but there is not enough urgency. We need to move fast. There is a lot of talk about the issues, but we need to focus on the solutions.
We need to ask ourselves why we have we not achieved more and recognise that numbers and scale matter. We need to be more ambitious.