Environment Education and Water Security
A] Importance
Promotes Awareness: Environmental education helps individuals and communities understand the significance of conserving natural resources, particularly water, and fosters a sense of responsibility.
Sustainable Practices: It equips people with knowledge to adopt sustainable practices like water conservation, recycling, and efficient usage.
Mitigates Scarcity: Understanding water security ensures actions are taken to preserve freshwater resources, vital for drinking, agriculture, and industry.
Addresses Climate Change: Environmental education highlights the role of ecosystems in water cycles, helping mitigate the impacts of climate change on water availability.
Declining Water Resources: Freshwater resources are rapidly depleting due to overuse, pollution, and climate change.
Unequal Distribution: Many regions face acute water shortages, affecting livelihoods and causing socio-political conflicts.
Role of Education: Countries with stronger environmental education programs exhibit better water management practices and policy compliance.
Community Engagement: Educated communities are more likely to implement localized solutions like rainwater harvesting and watershed management.
Investing in environmental education is essential for building a water-secure future. It empowers individuals and communities to act sustainably, ensuring the availability of clean water for generations to come.
B] Objective
Raise Awareness: Educate individuals and communities about the critical importance of water as a finite resource and the impact of human activities on its availability and quality.
Promote Sustainable Practices: Encourage behaviors such as water conservation, pollution prevention, and efficient resource management to sustain water ecosystems.
Empower Communities: Equip communities with the knowledge and skills to implement localized solutions, such as rainwater harvesting, watershed management, and water recycling.
Develop Policy Advocates: Foster understanding of water-related policies and empower individuals to participate in decision-making processes for sustainable water management.
Address Climate Impacts: Highlight the relationship between climate change and water security, promoting adaptive strategies to cope with changes in water availability.
Encourage Scientific Engagement: Motivate learners to explore innovative technologies and practices for water conservation and sustainable environmental management.
Foster Global Citizenship: Cultivate a sense of global responsibility to ensure equitable access to clean water and protect water resources for future generations.
By achieving these objectives, environmental education can significantly contribute to safeguarding water resources and promoting a balanced and sustainable coexistence with nature.
Water fuels every aspect of life. It’s essential for basic health and hygiene, and it drives society’s most essential industries: agriculture, energy and transportation. Without water security there can be no national security. In fact, water is essential to the stability of every country on the planet. Understanding water security means looking beyond immediate supply to political, economic, social and environmental impacts.
With climate change and variability comes fluctuating rainfall patterns and extreme temperatures, creating shorter rainy seasons and longer dry seasons. These shifts severely impact lives and livelihoods. Decreased water supplies mean more human suffering and increased risk of instability, violent conflict and migration. Often the areas most deeply affected by environmental changes are already impoverished, and lack the resources necessary for sound water management.
The Sustainable Water Partnership (SWP) program offers a pragmatic, science-based approach to water security which reflects local geographic and cultural conditions. Our system-thinking approach focuses on causes, not symptoms. It acknowledges uncertainties in information, science and technology, as well as socioeconomic, environmental and political factors, to design robust solutions.
C] AIM
Health: Societies depend on water for human survival. Without enough clean water, we cannot keep ourselves hydrated and clean, or provide sanitation services.
Livelihoods: Water is not only essential to life; it’s essential to the ways we secure our other basic necessities. Water fuels agriculture, energy production, transportation, and so many other activities which sustain human life.
Productive economies: When individual households can’t provide for themselves, society can’t achieve economic stability, much less growth. However, by improving water security in an area, we can foster economic growth, empowering livelihoods activities to succeed.
Ecosystems: Human needs are only one factor to consider when we think about water security. Ecosystems also rely on water, and rapidly deteriorate in its absence, thus endangering the many livelihoods and resources they provide.
Disaster risk reduction: Responsible water management can reduce the impacts of foreseeable stressors (long-term trends like climate change and variability, population growth or urbanization) or unpredictable shocks (sudden events, from floods and oil spills to political conflicts). This promotes stability, keeping migration and violent conflict from emerging.
D] Methodology
These capacity-building efforts can take many forms — developing, rehabilitating, or upgrading water structures and networks; promoting green infrastructure (like erosion control, reforestation or wetland restoration); or initiating behavior and policy changes. We give water users the tools necessary to address their current water risks, as well as any they may encounter in the future. Rather than leaving important water decisions up to uninformed government representatives, we bring disparate groups together to reach a consensus. We tailor our adaptive, science-based solutions to fit the unique challenges of geography, resource availability and cultural dynamics.
The long-standing cooperation between UNESCO and UNEP on environmental education (and later ESD) also led to the co-organization of four major international conferences on environmental education since 1977: the First Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education in Tbilisi, Georgia (October 1977); the Conference "International Strategy for Action in the Field of Environmental Education and Training for the 1990s" in Moscow, Russian Federation (August 1987); the third International Conference "Environment and Society: Education and Public Awareness for Sustainability" at Thessaloniki, Greece (December 1997); and the Fourth International Conference on Environmental Education towards a Sustainable Future in Ahmedabad, India (November 2007). These meetings highlighted the pivotal role education plays in sustainable development.
The term often implies education within the school system, from primary to post-secondary. However, it sometimes includes all efforts to educate the public and other audiences, including print materials, websites, media campaigns, etc. There are also ways that environmental education is taught outside the traditional classroom: aquariums, zoos, parks, and nature centers all have ways of teaching the public about the environment.
E] Observation
UNESCO's involvement in environmental awareness and education goes back to the very beginnings of the Organization, with the creation in 1948 of the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature, now the World Conservation Union), the first major non-governmental organization (NGO) mandated to help preserve the natural environment. UNESCO was also closely involved in convening the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972, which led to the setting up of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Subsequently, for two decades, UNESCO and UNEP led the International Environmental Education Programme (1975-1995), which set out a vision for, and gave practical guidance on how to mobilize education for environmental awareness.
In 1976, UNESCO launched an environmental education newsletter 'Connect' as the official organ of the UNESCO-UNEP International Environmental Education Programme (IEEP). It served as a clearinghouse to exchange information on Environmental Education (EE) in general and to promote the aims and activities of the IEEP in particular, as well as being a network for institutions and individuals interested and active in environment education until 2007.
F] Conclusion
These capacity-building efforts can take many forms — developing, rehabilitating, or upgrading water structures and networks; promoting green infrastructure (like erosion control, reforestation or wetland restoration); or initiating behavior and policy changes. We give water users the tools necessary to address their current water risks, as well as any they may encounter in the future.
Rather than leaving important water decisions up to uninformed government representatives, we bring disparate groups together to reach a consensus. We tailor our adaptive, science-based solutions to fit the unique challenges of geography, resource availability and cultural dynamics.
One of the current trends within environmental education seeks to move from an approach of ideology and activism to one that allows students to make informed decisions and take action based on experience as well as data. Within this process, environmental curricula have progressively been integrated into governmental education standards. A study found that standardized curriculum can be a significant impediment to environmental education implementation.
Some environmental educators find this movement distressing and move away from the original political and activist approach to environmental education while others find this approach more valid and accessible. Regardless, many educational institutions are encouraging students to take an active role in environmental education and stewardship at their institutions.
They know that "to be successful, greening initiatives require both grassroots support from the student body and top down support from high-level campus administrators.