EDUCATION FOR LIFE THEME: Sustainable development.
We at Shiv Nadar School believe that apart from academic excellence our children need knowledge, skills, and attitude to face a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world. Keeping up with the same idea we relaunched our education for life programme after two years. This programme aims at providing exposure and engagement to navigate and succeed in life beyond school for Grade IX and IX students.
A workshop based on our EFL theme of sustainability was conducted by Ms.Jayati Talapatra focusing on sustainable development goal 12 i.e: responsible consumption and production in order to understand how individual thinking processes impact an individual’s as well as the community’s chances of surviving in the face of resource limitations. Ms. Talapatra’s been working on Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change. Her focus is on generating awareness within corporates on the impact of business actions on the Planet and consequently, Humans. She teaches Business Sustainability in TERI School of Advance Studies and her course on Businesses and Biodiversity is a first of its kind in Indian Business-schools. She started Dilli Meri Jaan Walks, an initiative to restore Delhi’s ecology. These are designed for creating awareness of ecosystem services and taking action to regenerate biodiversity. The walks ensure that each participant takes back a concrete action item, to reduce their carbon and resource footprint and another to improve the quality of air, water, and soil of their city.
The session started by collecting a wider understanding of how fast fashion has over-consumed and how as responsible consumers we can promote both economic development and social and environmental improvement side by side. She reflected upon the basic idea of bringing small lifestyle changes to move towards a larger goal and help the earth regenerate.
She explained how the greatest global challenge is to integrate environmental sustainability with economic growth and welfare by decoupling environmental degradation from economic growth and doing more with less. Resource decoupling and impact decoupling are needed to promote sustainable consumption and production patterns and to make the transition toward a greener and more socially inclusive global economy.
To ensure sustainable consumption and production practices necessarily entails respecting the biophysical boundaries of the planet and reducing current global consumption rates in order to fit with the biophysical capacity to produce ecosystem services and benefits. Bringing minor changes in our lifestyle right from sending acknowledgment emails to sustaining gadgets and electronics and switching to brands that promote sustainable consumption will eventually limit the depletion of resources and trigger the process of regeneration at a much faster pace. The session was enthralling and gave a lot of insight into the best practices for making sustainable development more impactful.