Nils Vagstad and Mike Doyle

The world is facing many environmental problems all around the globe today. In this year’s Environmental Global Concerns (GC) we explored some of these issues, with the events of the day being titled, ‘Our Earth, Our Future’. The event was organized by and for the students.

The aim of the GC was to raise awareness and to motivate students to make positive changes for the sake of the environment and this started the day before the GC. On Thursday the school celebrated Earth Hour. Earth Hour is a worldwide movement organized by the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature). The event is held annually encouraging individuals, communities, and businesses to turn off non-essential electric lights for one hour, from 8.30 to 9.30 pm. We celebrated this event by having a bonfire with hot chocolate and snacks.

On the day itself we had interesting lectures from Mike Doyle from UWC Maastricht on the topic of, Towards Carbon-neutral UWC’s and from Nils Vagstad from NiBIO who talked about Food security, nutrition and sustainability: A global challenge- a common responsibility.

During the day we also had a lot of workshops organized by students themselves. Here is an overview of all the workshops:

1. The meat industry: Dog farming
2. Hike and Food discussion
3. Vegetarianism and Veganism
4. Algae and Plastic in the Ocean
5. Do It Yourself
6. The Dark Side of Charity
7. Indigenous cultures and the Environment
8. Reasons behind, Solutions and Sustainable Energy
9. Cooking with Local food
10. Insects and New technologies
11. Creative solutions to environmental issues

At the end of the day we all hope that the students learned a lot of new things about our earth and came to recognise ever more strongly that it is worth fighting for its future – and our future.