Following ICHK’s recent participation at the CDNIS Sustainable Development Goals Summit, Sustainability Coordinator Jon Rees reflects on the power of partnerships in creating change
It seems that our planet faces a very precarious future.
But if we can work together, there is still a chance that we can mitigate the harm that we have caused to our environment and ecosystems in just the three hundred years since the advent of the Industrial Age.
What other choice do we have if we want to protect what the famous cosmologist, Carl Sagan, reflected: ”(is) the only home we’ve ever known?”
It would take enormous global-political-economic restructuring to wrestle not just our species’ fate back-from-the-brink, but that of an estimated 1 million plant and animal species that are threatened with extinction by 2050, according to a UN Biodiversity Report from 2019.
But at ICHK, the Eco Warriors have been finding out that in just one term’s work, significant changes can be implemented within our school and they are learning the social and cognitive technologies needed to make changes at a wider level in the future.
Damion Loh, Daisy Palmer, Marcus Lee and Sam Lee, representatives of ICHK’s School Media Team, School Representative Council and the Eco Warriors, attend the CDNIS SDG Goals Summit, March 2023.
Currently, it appears we are destined to fall hopelessly short of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals outlined by the United Nations in 2015 in their 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Meeting these goals was always going to be tough. Maybe they were too aspirational, but at least they exist and are something to aim towards based on a rigorous, realistic assessment of our planet’s health.
When we attended the Canadian School’s SDG Summit this month, I found myself agreeing with Chris Brown, organiser of ReThink- Hong Kong’s largest sustainability event- when he stated that SDG No.17: Partnerships & Goals should be number one as all the others were dependent on the capacity for individuals, society, governments, and businesses to get together and make change.
Covid, along with various economic and political turmoils, has slowed us down in our capacity for international collaboration and the sooner we can refocus on our planetary health, the better.
The CDNIS panel: Shalini Mahtani, founder of the Zubin Foundation which protects Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities; Dana Winograd, founder of Plastic Free Seas; Peggy Chan, founder of the Grassroots Initiatives Consultancy; Matt Friedman, the founder of Mekong Club which fights against modern slavery; ReThink organiser, Chris Brown
At the conference, we got to hear from many powerful voices who are leading actors in the sustainability sector here in Hong Kong. The keynote speaker, Olivia Cotes-James, is a leading menstrual equity educator and the founder of Luüna Naturals. “Her healthy, sustainable, and accessible period products” were introduced by our SRC to the girls’ bathrooms at ICHK some years back to help remove stigma and promote natural conversations about the natural bodily cycles experienced by 50% of our school population. Cotes-James raised the statistic that if a girl goes on her period as she becomes a teenager, spending 5 days approximately per month on her period, then across a typical ovulation life cycle of 30 years or so, women spend 5 years on their period.
But so often in Cotes-James’ experience she found that conversations around female bodily health were stigmatised, products were uncomfortable, and, also, produced from plastic-based materials which were non-biodegradable. She joined the dots between the SDG goals of Gender Equality, Clean Water and Sanitation, and Responsible Consumption and Production by explaining how her products help to improve the quality and dignity of life for females, as well as addressing the problem of plastic waste as it washed up on our shores.
Olivia Cotes-James’ speech to students and educators at the conference highlighted the innovation and dedication needed to systematically rethink our personal and social relationships, along with those of our planet.
Olivia Cotes-James illustrates the connectedness of the SDG Goals as she discusses her collaboration with Harry Chan, a diver dedicated to clearing up the “ghost nets” that plague Hong Kong’s coastal waters, (as well as the myriad other forms of plastic waste.)
Thinking about problems in complexity and connectedness has certainly been my experience in my first year as sustainability coordinator at ICHK. My role has been all about learning the many complex ways that schools operate themselves as microcosms of wider society and achieve their successes- and are limited to some extent- through the relationships between stakeholders such as pupils and teachers, within the framework of the senior leadership team, who themselves operate within the financial constraints of the budget, the building contracts with the Education Bureau, the board of governors, etc.
So, what can we do within this network of compromises?
We can identify the need to address issues in a practical, pragmatic fashion and collaborate together in research-based action. The project I’m most proud of is the emergence of a recognisable and growing Eco Warriors group across this last term. Students themselves have been brilliant in managing their own deadlines and their commitment to pushing towards some important tangible goals within our first term together.
Eco Warriors: Ewan Chan, Hana Bridgeford, Sam Lee, Jake Ransom, Marcus Lee, Lawrence Hylton, Rick Goto and Ayden Hoogendijk
We have worked closely with Ivan, who runs the canteen, and Alan Shieff, Ivan’s line manager at Compass, to try to ensure that we can implement our main goals of reducing food waste after finding out that as a community we conservatively throw away 25kg of waste per lunchtime per day.
Additionally, we’ve been campaigning to eliminate as many types of single-use plastic as we can from the canteen. After plastic bottles and sugary drinks were taken off the menus a few years back, now we’ve managed to get rid of plastic forks. But we’ve experienced a lot of metal cutlery going missing! After three years of Covid-related disposable culture for sanitation reasons, we urgently need to reprogramme ourselves to make sure we take care of the resources available to us, a point pithily driven home in this excellent video produced by Y10s, Yuffy Tam and Vanessa Tin, in a recent Human Technologies class.
Well done to Yuffy and Vanessa who produced this timely and very well-produced video about saving metal cutlery from the bin!
Yet, as we explored further into the issue of food waste, Michelle Rines, Head of Science, pointed to the research carried out by her previous Y13 Environment and Social Systems class who adopted a “systems thinking” approach to improving the flow system of waste disposal so it would be more efficient, as well as cleaner, thus improving the lunch experience of students and reducing our carbon footprint.
Work is underway to remodel the canteen based on this research and potential future composting goals which outdoor leader, Dave Addis, has been researching.
I’ll take the remaining moments to quickly reinforce the Eco Warriors other key message which we, again, need your partnership in if we want to achieve our goals!
Air-Conditioners: Please, as the hotter weather reappears, can we run these at a reasonable 23C rather than 18C. Research by George Woodman’s sustainability team at ISF, strongly indicates that this could help save 50% of emissions, as well as the money we could save as a school. Students in Y10 Human Tech classes created posters to address these issues.
Horace Lai, Ethan Wu, Herman Yeung Katherine Chan, Charlotte Ho, Abri Ng, Ai Senaratne
I look forward to continuing the work the Eco Warriors have started, as well as collaborating with the widely diverse range of curricular & extra-curricular clubs that we operate at ICHK to help students actively learn about what they can do to live a more sustainable future…
Sustainability, Human Technologies and Theory of Knowledge 