Schoolchildren to combat climate change

Hyderabad, July 21 : What started as a simple awareness programme on global warming and climate change for students has today turned them into Young Climate Savers who have geared up to tackle the impacts of climate change in cities across India.The Young Climate Savers, a joint initiative between World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)-India and Tetra Pak India, is a school based climate change and lifestyle education programme based on education for sustainable development and people's participation.The programme launched in 2007 has targeted more than 50,000 students across 10 cities in India and the programme, has been instrumental in raising awareness about the ill effects of climate change. Students across these cities pledged to take up the cudgel to combat climate change. Rachna, student of Rosary Convent School in Hyderabad said: "As Young Climate Savers, we took a pledge to arrest Global Warming by switching off our school lights and other electrical appliances when not in use and help conserve electricity". Sister Ann Imelda of Carmel School in Kolkata felt that the "Young Climate Savers programme has immense importance and played a major role in disseminating knowledge about Climate Change to the future generations of our society".The first phase of the initiative dealt with creating awareness on history, science and adverse impact of climate change while the second phase was more hands on with students taking up small projects within the school premises. Some of the key achievements of the schools , include students of Blue Bells School in New Delhi, who designed and conceptualized a unique project where water left over in the water bottle at the end of the day would be collected in a tank placed near the exit gate of the school. This collected water would then be utilized to water the garden.Sri Sikshayatan School students' in Kolkata showed a decrease of 50pc energy usage in their school electricity bill through their energy conservation project in the school.Students of Abhyasa Residential School located on the outskirts of Hyderabad made newspaper bags and distributed them to hawkers and grocers in the villages surrounding their schools.The second phase also saw student leaders emerge as peer educators and spread the message to their peers in and around their schools.The programme in its third phase will see the Peer Educators come together as a Young Climate Savers Task Force in the cities of New Delhi, Bhopal, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. This task force of students from at least 12 schools each across these cities will work on a city level problem and collectively work towards finding a long term sustainable solution. Madhur Das, Director, Conservation Alliances, WWF-India, said, "This is seen to be the first of its kind of student level initiative to be taken up in the country and is expected to impact directly and indirectly more than 1,00,000 citizens across the country".The recommendations and solutions from these initiatives carried out across India will be handed over to the respective city civic authorities for further action.
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