ECO Singapore Delegation to UNCSD

Just over an hour ago, the ECO@CSD19 delegation met up in the airport. The team had their last meeting (with the presence and blessings of families and friends) prior to departing on their exciting journey to the UNCSD19!

Here’s a shot of them in the tee shirt proudly sponsored (and designed) by Etrican.

And another with the family and friends sending them off at the airport.

The team will be meeting up with other team members Elycia, Jia Wen & LJ.

WATCH THIS SPACE!

Aaron Yeo is an undergraduate reading Political Science with Singapore Management University. He took 6 months off to do an internship with Starwood Hotels and Resorts. He aspires to be a Research Analyst in a bank. While most people passionate about Sustainable development choose to avoid the financial institutions, he believes the way to change an institution is to enter it, engage it and rise to a position where you are able to make decisions that can alter the course of the business. His work with ECO Singapore includes a series of governmental interactions, community outreaches and even a small part of consultancy in the upcoming World Leadership Conference to be held in Singapore. Together with other volunteers from ECO Singapore, he prepares policy recommendations and opinions to feedback to the relevant governmental agencies. He is also involved in raising awareness about SCP. Ultimately his aim with ECO Singapore is to further his knowledge, step out of my comfort zone and be the change he would like to see at the same time raising awareness amongst others and showing others that Youths need not necessarily be apathetic to the larger issues in life.

Belicia Lim is an undergraduate doing Biotechnology at Ngee Ann Polytechnic. She is currently in her last year of tertiary education. Her interests lie in legal, social issues and environmental issues. Having volunteered at ECO Singapore, for the past two year, she has had been involved in many of ECO Singapore’s programmes such as the World Leadership Conference. And she has also been promoting environmental outreach to the public. She is also a volunteer at National Youth Council promoting advocacy. She hopes that this trip would allow her to better understand policy formation and to be the young change maker of this generation.

Elycia Koh is an undergraduate reading Law and Political Science at the Singapore Management University. She is currently in my third year of tertiary education. She is particularly interested in legal, political, social, and environmental issues. She always believes that sustainable development is an ethical obligation. And she wants to introduce this ethical obligation to peoples of the world. At ECO Singapore, she is engaged in interactions with the government and is involved in the upcoming Singapore’s World Leadership Conference. Along with her team members and other youth volunteers, she drafts policy papers for the consideration of governmental agencies.

Hoe Jia Wen is a freshman at Tufts University and has been involved with Eco Singapore for the last two years. Last year, she went with Eco Singapore to CSD-18. Her work with Eco Singapore includes writing preliminary reports and final reports before and after CSD meetings, liasing with the Singapore government to discuss sustainable development in Singapore, and volunteering at Eco Singapore activities like Earth Hour.

Jonathan Lim is a final year high school student reading the International Baccalaureate in Anglo-Chinese School (Independent). He is highly involved in the environmental movement and has been a part of his school’s environmental club since 2007. He strongly believes that the best way to change our society is to reach out to youth at a young age before bad habits set in. His work with ECO Singapore will include community and governmental consultation in preparation for CSD19, as well as involvement in the World Leadership Conference 2011 later in the year. He strives to generate greater public awareness on the necessity and urgency of sustainable development. He also seeks to bring such ideas into the pre-University schooling system of Singapore through the network of school environmental clubs already existing.

Steffi Loe is currently an undergraduate doing her honours in Literature at Nanyang Technological University. She has had a deep interest in environmental issues since she was a child. Her personal decision to turn vegetarian and her compulsive readings of countless National Geographic magazines only served to fuel her interest in these issues. She interned at the Outreach division at the National Parks Board’s Central Nature Reserve and the experience only strengthened her decision to pursue a conservation-related career in the future. She believes there is a lot of apathy and cynicism with regards to solving prevalent problems in the environment and this only strengthens her desire to make an effort in raising awareness towards these issues. She believes that sustainability is a practical solution in working towards a compromise to reduce human impact on the environment. With ECO Singapore, she is involved in both CSD19 and the World Leadership Conference which aims to draft policy recommendations with sustainable development in mind and interactions with governmental agencies to present these policies.

Tan Mei Jia volunteers actively with ECO Singapore and has participated in the 18th session of the Commission on Sustainable Development in May 2010. This year, she has decided to take up the role of Coordinator of ECO Singapore’s youth delegation to CSD19 to be better able to contribute to the process. She was responsible for selecting the youth delegates, and is currently coordinating the work for ECO Singapore’s CSD19 delegation, which includes government and private sector engagement, pre-trip report writing, trip administration and post-trip follow-up activities. In line with ECO Singapore’s World Leadership Conference (WLC) 2011, she will also work with WLC delegates and participate in WLC itself in July 2011.

Yours truly,

While I was preparing myself to write an entry, I browsed through the various posts written by my team mates: Introduction – check; Philosophy – check; Historical archives – check…  (Sometimes you got to hate these people. They seem to know everything!) Then a thought crossed my mind. A little tiny weeny thought which seems harmless at first but really isn’t.

Who cares?!

Indeed who cares? or rather why should we? In a world modelled by blind capitalism, money and greed seems to be the religion of many, sufficient to pacify and enough to satisfy. So blinded are we that many fail to see the path of destruction we left behind in the pursuit of our  material lust. At the world’s current rate of consumption, we are consuming 6 planets worth of resouces…(How many planet earth do we have again ?) The global population is set to tripple by 2050; rising inflation and economic uncertainities are pushing thousands if not more into poverty and hunger. In the midst of such alarming statistics, what are we concerned about in our daily lives?

I’m not writing to start a debate of what happiness really is or how each of us should live our lives ( I leave that part to Peter Singer’s article- The life you can save) What i’m really asking is for all of us to do a little reflection. What are we pursuing in our lives? What does it all mean? Perhaps then and only then we can answer the question “Why should we care?”

We’ve got the process all wrong these days. We pursue, achieve and then think about why we are doing what we do. Shouldn’t it be the other way round? Shouldn’t we start off by rationalising the purpose of pursing a particular cause, setting out to achieve it and achieve it Weird isn’t it?

Just like this message which will end the way it’s suppose to start.

Hi everyone, this is Aaron.

Hello world, Elycia writing.

I was revisiting a piece of work that I had submitted to ECO Singapore a few weeks ago when I started to re-think at the possibility of a “philosophy of sustainable development”.

The kind of philosophy that I had (and still have) in mind concerns not only the working framework, something which is rather commonplace in many environmental conventions, agreements, and the like, but also the “classical” philosophy involving rigorous questioning of the source of our obligation not to harm the environment, the nature of this obligation (is it moral or legal or something else?), the extent of the obligation (inter-generational and/or intra-generation?), and whether there exists such obligation to begin with.

These questions require serious discovery of the relationship between man and his environment, and the idea the “common good” – is protecting the environment the “common good” for society? And what do we mean by “common”? And what do we mean by “good”? Who decides whether the protection of our environment is to be classified as an endeavor in search of the “common good”? Is it the majority population that decides? Or is it the powerhouses who will determine which direction the world is heading toward regarding environmental protection? Or is it the countries that have borne most of the brunt of environmental degradation? Just who is it who ought to decide?

It is by now at least clear that the questions concerning environmental protection and sustainable development are as philosophical as “conventional” or “classical” philosophical questions on life, death, and the law.

I do not claim to have answers to all these questions. Indeed, I believe that answers to these questions must be explored and ascertained through the Socratic dialectical form of exchange. And I do hope that my participation at the UNCSD19 will allow me to be involved in such an exchange in search for the answers.

Hi everyone, this is Jonathan from the ECO Singapore CSD19 team. It’s already the 22^nd of April here in Singapore so I would like to wish all of you a Happy Earth Day!

Today, we celebrate the 41^st Earth Day. As we engage in various environmental celebrations and projects, I would like to take a look at the history of Earth Day, as well as the current status of the world today.

Earth Day was first held in 1970. Horrified by what he saw in the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill of the coast of southern California, United States of America (USA) Senator Gaylord Nelson, conceived the idea of organizing a celebration in support of the environment. After a year of canvassing for support, the 1^st Earth Day was met with tremendous support, with more than 20 million Americans observing the occasion. In addition to raising greater awareness of environmental issues among the general populace, the inaugural Earth Day also brought together various groups campaigning against oil spills, loss of biodiversity and wilderness, pesticides and factory pollution, all of whom realized for the first time that they shared common ground. With this, the modern environmentalism as we know it was finally underway.

It has been 41 years since that day, but exactly how much progress has been made on the environmental front? The initial problems that Earth Day set out to combat, such as factory pollution, toxic dumps, widespread usage of pesticides and oil spills all still exist; as seen most recently in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. More worryingly, depletion of our natural forests and destruction of our biodiversity seems to have actually increased. According to data compiled by the Zoological Society of London in 2008, between a quarter and a third of the wildlife seen in 1970 is now extinct, including animals such as the Pyrenean Ibex and the Black-Spotted Damselfish. Many other once abundant animals, such as the Bluefin Tuna, are now dangerously close to extinction.

Such disheartening trends can also be seen in consumption. Coinciding with the rise of developing countries such as China and India, global consumption of energy has risen from 227 Exajoules in 1970 to 457 Exajoules in 2005. That’s 457,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules, or approximately 75 billion barrels of oil! Although the share of renewable energy sources as a total of all energy consumed has indeed risen from 7% to 15% in that same period, the dramatic increases in global consumption more than offset those gains.

Global Energy Consumption; 1970-2007

These trends are not just limited to energy. Consumption of all products ranging from food to plastics has risen significantly in these 4 decades. While this has resulted partially from an increase in living standards in some developing countries and an overall increase in the world’s population, I feel that there is a far more fundamental reason for this; inefficiency and overconsumption.

Regional Waste Generation; 1970-2002

Since 1970, waste generation has increased approximately 2.5 times, far outstripping increases in standard of living or population. In outsourcing production to less developed countries, an inevitable tradeoff must be made in efficiency; unlike in Europe and North America, high efficiency may not be economically viable or even possible due to a lack of supporting infrastructure. This has created a situation in which wastages from production has become more widespread.

However, it is not all doom and gloom, progress has also been made in environmental efforts. Just two days ago, the government of Singapore gave official recognition to Earth Day, declaring it Youth for the Environment Day. This has given a significant and timely boost to the Earth Day Celebrations, elevating it from a low-level event held individually by a small group of schools to an official event marked in the national education calendar to be observed by all schools in Singapore. I have had the pleasure of witnessing firsthand the positive effect in my own school. In contrast to previous years, the student body displayed tremendous enthusiasm and support for the Earth Day Celebrations, participating enthusiastically in various environmentally-themed competitions held in the school. The student volunteers too, seemed infused with a fresh desire and new vigor to do their part for the environment.

On a global scale, Earth Day too has grown. From a mere national event in 1970, Earth Day has grown into a massive international event today, with more than 500 million people from 175 countries observing it. Reflecting this major shift in mindset, the United Nations too gave recognition to Earth Day, designating it International Mother Earth Day in 2009. Changing the mindset of the populace is the first step in bringing about any form of change and as such, this certainly bodes well for a greener future. Now that is certainly something worth celebrating.

Wishing you a wonderful and fulfilling Earth Day!

Jonathan