 Great. We're going to get started. So it's time to show you some of myself in the room. Thank you very much for joining us on this webinar for Sustainability. So as always, just make sure your line is muted if you're not speaking. Use the chat box and I will be recording the webinar and sending the link to you either today or tomorrow. So if you do miss anything or want to review it again, that's available. And also if you want to share anything on social media, you can just use the hashtag Sustainability and type the entire hand call for D. Great. So I'm going to pass it over to Frances to do an introduction of our speaker. Thank you very much, Christina. And good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are to our first webinar for 2018, where the title of the webinar is Environmental Sustainability and Education. And we have our speaker this morning right here from British Columbia in Abbotsford, Jennifer Long. You have to correct me when you speak. Jennifer is a school teacher in Chelevec and she is well-traveled and the basis of the travel is mostly to explore the globe as I can see it. She has had the opportunity to share this explorations of her with the students by arranging a variety of global excursions for them to various countries including Mexico and China. And as you witnessed the personal growth of the students, because of all of this, she decided in 2010 to take a two-year leave of absence. And at that time she went to Costa Rica, where she worked for a very small nonprofit environmental school in the cloud forest of Montevada. And during this time she could put the theory into practice where she could put all the concepts that she learned at university and came across in the book. She could really put it into practice while working there. And she also had the experience to develop lessons rooted in the environment. When she came back from there she had a renewed passion and she was inspired for biology. She was a renewed passion for biology and she was inspired and having a broader cultural awareness. And she decided to channel all of that into creating an ecotourism and environmental biology course. But Jennifer in 2014 was selected as one of the 25 National Geographic Grosvenor Fellows. The Grosvenor Teacher Fellow Program is a professional development opportunity for pre-K to 12 educators or teachers as we know them in many countries or referred to them. And this was made possible by a partnership through the Lin-Fat Expeditions and also the National Geographic Society. And those of you who are watching those channels would be very much envious of this woman who had this brilliant opportunity. But this opportunity didn't come just like that. She was very hard to be selected as one of the 25. They referred to them as exemplary educators and then they have to complete a series of deliverables and that enabled them to transfer those experiences into new ways to teach students and engage colleagues. And through this experience they bring new geographic awareness into the learning environment and communities. So you will agree with me that Jennifer with all of this experience is the perfect person to speak to us today as an educator on how we can bring environmental sustainability together with education. Whether it is formal education or non-formal education, whether it is just education or just learning through this process. She is coming from a very practical perspective. I think that will also help us. And we are all very excited Jennifer to listen to your presentation. So without further ado, I will give the mic back to Christina who will now ask Jennifer to speak. And I just saw her picture coming up on the screen. Good morning Jennifer. Good morning. Hi, thank you. Thank you and welcome everyone to the webinar today on environmental sustainability and education. I was originally supposed to do this webinar back in November and unfortunately had a family emergency and so had to cancel last minute. But I know that many of you sent well wishes and thoughts and prayers and so I really appreciate that and I appreciate everybody's understanding that in terms of rescheduling and everything. And that's actually a really great segue into my first slide. So I'm going to turn off the camera here so I'm not a distraction. And Christina, I'll get you to switch to that first slide. Perfect. So the first slide basically I just wanted to sort of go over who I am and also who I'm what I'm not. So I'm an aunt, a sister, a daughter and a friend and I'm an outdoor lover and traveler. Those two things have really for me driven a lot of my my choices and, you know, my, my education practice in life, as you'll see through today's presentation. And that's also led me to become an ecotourism and biology teacher in Chiloac, British Columbia. What I am not is an expert in the field by any means. I feel like there's a lot of people who know a lot more than I do. But I still think it's important to share what I've learned and the practice that I have. And I'm not an expert in each of your countries and they're varying unique and unique needs. And for me, the average North American spends less than 10% of their life outside. So the challenges that I face when I'm engaging students in environmental sustainability are going to be very different than the challenges faced by students in other countries who are living in floodplains or temporary settlements for migrant workers and such. So my goal for this presentation is not to tell you what you should or shouldn't be doing. It's to provide you with one perspective, my perspective of sustainability and show you how it's defined my particular teaching practice. By the end of this presentation, I hope there is something that you can take away and use towards your own sustainable development goals. Or maybe this presentation is just a stimulus to start a conversation within your own organizational area. So in terms of the presentation, the general sort of overview of it, I'll start off by defining sustainability and just talking a little bit about what some of the views on sustainability are. And also why it's important to talk about sustainability and then how culture ties into that from there also to shift into my own journey and elaborate a little bit on what Francis was talking about in terms of my experiences in British Columbia, international travel with students. My two years spent in Costa Rica, and then of course the National Geographic Grosvenor Fellowship to Antarctica and how that sort of allowed me to create this ecotourism course that I now teach. From there, I'll just touch a little bit on the UN International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development and some of their suggestions for the way forward. And then hopefully we'll have a little bit of time at the end to share a little bit and I'll field any questions that you guys might have. So in terms of defining sustainability, when we define sustainability or sustainable development, the definition that most people are familiar with is the one from the Bruntland report of 1987. And that's the one that says sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. I personally oftentimes use this particular definition in my classroom. And while it's widely accepted as correct, it's definitely not without its critics. There are many people who claim that it's more inspirational than practical. Others say that it is not precise and measurable and that there's too much room for interpretation and so there's disagreement on what those future needs might actually be. But probably the most notable critique is that it deals with the issues surrounding social, environmental, and economy separately, failing to recognize or acknowledge the interconnectedness of those things. The bottom picture shows the three pillars of sustainability model. It's a powerful tool for defining the complete sustainability problem. Under this model, if any one pillar, so social, environmental, or economic, is weak, the system as a whole is unstable. Therefore, it's been suggested that any discussion of sustainability should broach not just the topic of environmental sustainability, but social and economical sustainability as well. I think many of you would likely agree that a conversation on how to be more environmentally friendly or environment is sustainable in your specific communities would be a mute point if you're not also considering the changes and how those changes would affect potential for earning a living in your community, or how resources may be used in traditional ceremonies, etc. Yet even this model is not without critics who suggest that the three pillar model is too simplistic. And that sustainability instead needs a more complex model that involves systems level thinking. So Peter Sangay described systems thinking as a way of thinking about the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems in order to help us see how to change systems more effectively and to act more in tune with natural processes of the natural and economic worlds. In other words, it's important to see the world as a collection of interconnected systems. In the first diagram on the left, environment and economic systems are still given equal weight, but we now see the interaction between those systems. The point where all three systems overlap is a place in which we'll find sustainability of the system as a whole. In the second diagram on the right hand side, the largest system is biosphere in the biosphere in which we live. So environment is given the most important sort of spot within that framework lies the two human systems, the social and economic. This model shows that environmental sustainability must have the highest priority because it provides the ultimate constraints. The lower the carrying capacity of the environment, the lower the common good that can be delivered by the social system and the less output the economic system can produce. In other words, if the environment in which we live becomes more and more degraded, that in turn is going to put increased pressure on social and economic systems as areas run out of resources. And as we are definitely aware, this is already a reality in many places around the world. And that brings us to the second topic. Why is a conversation about sustainability important? It should go without saying that sustainability and the ability to meet future needs is a topic that should be central to every human being on this planet. The United Nations Environment Program warns that there's a very short time left, little more than a decade, within which to achieve environmental sustainability before entering a state of physical and economic decline. Which means that every single one of us is going to be impacted by the choices made by organizations, people and governments at this very moment. In his report, Usel emphasizes the concept of sustainable development as being one of the most important ideas of the 21st century, or 20th century, since it's around this concept that our common future turns. He continues on to say it demands that all citizens in general, but more particularly those in positions of political power, assume the responsibility for global environmental change. Like other monumental historic problems, solutions exist for the sustainability problem. However, this will take the identifying the root of the problem and starting there rather than trying to address one pillar at a time. Another thing to be considered at this point is the fact that globalization means that we've reached a point where global environmental problems are more serious than those that take place lower down on the spatial scale. Choices being made on one side of the world are having profound effects on communities the world over. And in many cases it's the developing countries that are being impacted the most. That's not to say that we can't tackle the problem at the local and global level, but certainly those of us that are living in nations that are causing disproportionally large effects are the ones who need to be doing the line share the work and the change. Let me get a flip to the next slide, Christina. Perfect. So another layer of the sustainability conversation is the role that culture plays in environment and sustainability. If we agree that the key components of the sustainability discussion include environment, economics and social culture must then be a key aspect of the social subsystem. It plays an inescapable and central role in all aspects of human behavior in cognition in preference and in the meaning we place on things. Culture itself evolved alongside humans and thus influences how we use resources and the value we place on our surroundings. Different aspects of the environment becomes salient to different groups. Their preferences vary on the basis of the different evaluations of environment quality based on different values, ideals and images. Another way of phrasing this is the explanation given by Chin Chin Cao and Terry Purcell. Pro environment attitudes and behaviors cannot be understood and sustained on a global level without a close link to the system of social values, which are in turn determined by the cultures in which they're rooted. So culture impacts the environmental sustainability at a few different levels. Firstly through its intrinsic link between cultural diversity and biodiversity, if they are particularly area, through its influence on consumption patterns and through its contribution to sustainable development or sustainable environmental management practices as a result of local and traditional knowledge. The close ties between culture and environment and the potential for culture to act as a driver and enabler of sustainable development is one that's been recognized by the international community. As outlined in the UN systems task team on the post 2015 UN development agenda. They found that culture can be the driver for development within community wide social, economical and environmental impacts. Cultural heritage, cultural creative industry and creative industries, sustainable cultural tourism and cultural infrastructure can serve as strategic tools for revenue generation, particularly in developing countries, given their often rich cultural heritage and substantial labor force. We're going to come back to this idea of culture as a powerful driver in a little bit, but for the time being I wanted to segue into how my own belief surrounding culture and environmental sustainable sustainability have been shaped over the years. While my journey to understanding issues of sustainability did not start with this particular question. In the last couple years I have come to understand the question of the what role educators play in preparing students to be global citizens and environmental stewards. And I've only come to realize recently how central it's been to me all along. I did first stumble upon this question in 2013 when I was completing an application for the National Geographic Grosvenor Fellowship, which I will definitely explain a little bit more about later. In having to write an essay response to this question, I was forced to pause and reflect on my values and how they had informed my practice up until that point. And it's this journey that I'm going to share with you over the next few slides. For me, environmental conscience started at a very young age. And so that's a picture of me enjoying the environment. At the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, Babadiyum made the well-known statement. In the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught. And for me this has definitely been a driving sort of statement, one that I've come back to many times throughout my career and my life in general. So I grew up in a family that valued the outdoors and spent a lot of time in nature. At two months old, my father would strap me into a sled and take me cross-country skiing for hours at a time. We hiked, we cycled, we canoed, we camped. And generally I grew up being taught to love outdoor pursuits. While as a child I may have complained when my father told me for the 15th time on that hike that our destination was just around the next corner, I have no doubt that all this time spent in nature is what really shaped me into the person that I am today. And while I was very fortunate to have a family that instilled a value of respect for the environment in me, I was also very aware that the same was not true for many of my friends. As I got older, I became more and more aware that our family was not the norm, and that many of my friends hadn't had the same exposure to the outdoors. I had to ask the question, if not from their families, then where would they learn to love the environment? The environmental experiences that started for me at a young age lay the groundwork and helped shape my beliefs of the role that educators play in fostering environmental stewards. When I eventually followed in the footsteps of my father in pursuit of career and education as a high school biology teacher, helping students to understand their environment was a primary focus. Family and school are two of the contexts in which children can become real promoters of the attitudinal and behavior changes that must be spread to all levels of community if we want to foster an environmental ethic of sustainability and conservation. I'll switch to the next slide there, yeah. Well, the environmental stewardship piece started at a young age for me. The global citizenship piece did not come until I had started my teaching career. In my second year of teaching, I was given the opportunity to organize a student trip to build houses in Mexico. 28 students and five adults spent eight days framing, roofing, stuccoing, and painting, while at the same time playing with the children in the neighborhood and getting to know the family that we were building for. The day we handed over the keys of the house to the family, I knew that their lives weren't the only ones that had been changed in that week. I was able to watch these students transform as they learned about another culture and began to understand and appreciate a way of life that was different from their own. By the last day and an emotional farewell, these students had formed bonds with these families. Many of those bonds have continued on to this very day. I've had a number of these students who have actually returned to visit those families. They've continued fundraising and they've even gone back to build more houses in the past few years. I'll never forget the words that one of those students had said to me at the end of the trip. Why is it that they have so little and are so happy while we have so much and are so unhappy? I truly believe that this is a level of understanding and awareness that can only come from immersion in these type of experiences for these students. And again, it brings me back to that quote by Duyum. In the end, we'll conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we're taught. I believe that it's especially important for those of us living in developed nations to ensure that we are teaching our students about other cultures and other ways of living to help build an understanding and a passion which will lead to a desire to help preserve cultural diversity. I did take two more groups of students to Mexico to build houses before shifting my focus and taking groups of students to China. The first year was a cultural exchange but in the second year we traveled to southern China to Wanshan in order to volunteer in an elementary school teaching English lessons and participating in their daily routines. We observed the structure imposed by their classes and participated in the manual labor lessons in the field behind the school. We observed the obvious poverty with 15 children squeezed into one small bedroom. Their single change of clothes folded neatly at the ends of their beds. We observed with some level of guilt while they received a single egg and a bun for lunch while we were fed a full meal in another room. But at the same time, we also saw children who were smiling and having fun and who were appreciative of everything that they had. We saw teachers and staff who cared about their students education and did everything they could with the resources that they had. I think that in the end, again, we learned just as much from them as they did from us. The students were again beginning to appreciate a way of life and a value system that was different than their own. And in my opinion, this is a big first step to becoming a global citizen. After a few years of teaching and leading international trips, I felt the need to do my own immersion experience where I could focus more on my own personal growth and understanding of other cultures and other ways of life. And so this is why in 2010, I took a leap of absence from my job in Canada and moved to Monteverde, Costa Rica. Monteverde itself is a town of about 6,000 people isolated on a mountain top in Costa Rica. It takes about, depending on whether it's rainy season or not, it takes about four to six hours in order to get up the mountain to this small little village. And I found a job as a science teacher at the Monteverde Cloud Forest School. It's a small nonprofit school with about 75% of students receiving either partial or full support for their tuition. 95% of the students at the school were local and about 5% of the school were students who'd come down with parents who were on sabbatical from universities in the states or in Canada. The school's goal was to graduate bilingual students with strong roots in environmentalism and it seemed to be the exact fit I was looking for. As a biology teacher, I was living my dream. The campus was 106 acres of cloud forest. My hallways became paths through the jungle, my classroom a single room structure without phone lines or Wi-Fi. This was a huge shift from the conditions I was used to in Canada. In North America, it was all about using the latest and greatest technology to engage student learners, but here the outdoors became my inspiration. It provided me with the opportunity to get outside of my classroom and create lessons and activities that were embedded in this environment that we were living in. Rather than relying on textbooks or videos on the internet to help teach students concepts, we would go outside and investigate the ecosystems around us. I was learning just as much from the students as they were from me. Many of them had grown up with parents who were guides at the local reserve and therefore tree and insect names and identification were second nature to them and so I learned a lot of that from them. Speaking of insects, I also learned how to deal with a variety of different challenges that come from living in a cloud forest. I had all sorts of insects, some of them dangerous, some of them not, and I would often have students come to my classroom with the newest beetle or snake or whatever they had found. And of course then there was the rainy season and the torrential downpours that would last for 40 days at a time and the mold that would grow on absolutely every surface in both the classroom and my house. As I learned to deal with all the various different challenges and became expired by my surroundings, perhaps one of the most meaningful projects that I completed with these students was an investigation of a local watershed. In Costa Rica, gray water, I'll go back to the last slide just for one last second. In Costa Rica, gray water, which is basically everything except for sewage from homes is allowed to be directly dumped into streams. So my grade 10 group was learning about watersheds and we decided that in addition to doing our regular water testing that we would hike the length of one of the streams in town. It's called the cabrata susia, which ironically means dirty stream. So as we went walk the stream, we had a camera and a GPS in hand and every time we would find a gray water input. So one of those pipes you see in the right hand picture, we would basically drop a GPS waypoint as well as take a picture, a time stamp picture of that particular gray water input. We then use the GPS waypoints in the photographs and put them together into a map of all the gray water inputs along the length of the stream. So we uploaded this data and created an interactive map in which people could click on each of the different waypoints and up would come the picture and so you're seeing a screenshot from that interactive map there. And basically we created brochures to help the inform the residents of the impact of dumping gray water into streams and ways they could minimize this impact. We presented the the brochures and the interactive map to the city of Monteverde to help inform them. And then the final summative piece of this presentation was to present our work at the eco for conference in Eredia Costa Rica, as well as by escape to students in the US who are involved in a worldwide Walden project. So as you can see from the next picture. Perfect. These kids were having fun in nature. But while they were having fun they were also learning practical and real real world skills. So this was an authentic, you know, research project that actually inform the city and really help the kids understands with their their place that they were living. So when I moved back to Canada after my two years in Costa Rica, I decided that I needed to continue incorporating the lessons I had learned in my classrooms in Costa Rica at home in the classrooms in Canada. I was offered the chance to create an environmental biology and ecotourism course. And of course I said yes. Through this course I was able to take students hiking camping snowshoeing and paddleboarding. We visited wetlands identified plants and we tested water parameters as these students spent more and more time outdoors doing activities that they enjoyed and making emotional connections to the to what they were exploring. It was an easy next step to initiate a discussion about the importance of conserving it. And again, it comes back to that quote by Dume in the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught. I continued organizing international student trips, but this time trying to focus on trips that emphasize both environmental and cultural aspects. And I'll get you to switch the slide there. There was two years of taking Canadian students to volunteer at the Cloud Forest School in Costa Rica before shifting the focus to Peru where we participated in a research project in the Pacaia Sumeria Reserve. Let's let the page to the next one. And over the course of the two weeks that we were there, students collected data about a wide variety of species. Their work was part of a bigger research project investigating the effects of climate change on the Amazon rainforest. They were also able to interact with the people in local villages to learn how climate change was impacting their traditional ways of life. These students were getting the bigger picture about how the decisions they were making at home in Canada were impacting people the world over, people and species the world over. For me, providing opportunities for my students to connect with nature, the natural and social world is what is going to provide them with the motivation required to make the necessary changes to their life choices. And I'll get you to switch to the next picture. As this graphic shows, it's important that we provide them with a variety of lenses in which to provide their world or review their world on a local, regional and global level. The National Geographic Learning Framework seeks to create students who are curious, adventurous, responsible for others and the natural world and empowered and persistent in the face of challenges. This past September, I attended the World Environmental Education Congress, the aim of which was one that really resonated with me. Their aim was to promote active, informed and responsible citizenship as a condition for a more peaceful, fair and ecological human society to guarantee an equitable access to natural resources and harmonious relationship among human beings, other living beings and the planet. So speaking of National Geographic, the final piece to my journey was with recognizing that it's not just the students that we need to be connecting with the environment and other cultures, but teachers as well. If we want 21st century learners, we must also create 21st century teachers and actually I'll go back to that first picture. Thank you. At the same time that I had been working to create these various different opportunities for my students, I had inadvertently been creating those exact same opportunities for myself. While my students were learning respect for other cultures, so was I. While my students were learning to stand up paddleboard and become passionate about protecting the bodies of water on which they were doing it, so was I. Organizations like National Geographic and Limbat expeditions have recognized the importance of teacher experience and have established programs such as the Grove North Teacher Fellowship for this reason. Each year they choose between 25 and 35 teachers from across North America to participate in expeditions to places like Iceland, Greenland, the Arctic Svalbard, the Galapagos Islands and Antarctica. Their goal is that teachers go and gain firsthand experience that they can come back and share with their classrooms, professional networks and communities. And we'll go to that next picture now. In 2014, I was fortunate to be chosen for one of these fellowships and was able to travel to Antarctica. Having the opportunity to work and learn alongside naturalists who are experts in everything from cetaceans to penguins to whales to glaciers was the opportunity of a lifetime. It has allowed me to infuse my lessons with a new level of passion and excitement. I'm able to create authentic real life activities using data that I collected, which in turn may fit more engaging for the students. One of my favorite things that I brought back from Antarctica was actually I had the opportunity to work alongside a naturalist to use a remote operated vehicle, a submersible that went into areas where it was too deep for the dive team to go. And we collected data and footage, video footage that we basically put together into about an eight minute video for my students in which they could see all the underwater life in that particular area along the Antarctic Peninsula. So to be able to show students a video that I helped to create and it features a lot of the species that we study in Biology 11 is a pretty unique and special opportunity. Well, and I'll flip to the next picture there. Well, it would be far too expensive to send an entire class to Antarctica by sending a teacher there. It means that I am able to bring this remote and threatened continent to life for my students and thereby help them to create the emotional connections that will then in turn. Foster a desire to protect in them. After my expedition to Antarctica, I then traveled to Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island. This was an especially poignant experience for me because I was able to witness firsthand an area where there had been a collapse of a culture and its subsequent revitalization through ecotourism. It's believed that there was a massive decline in the Rapa Nui culture because of over exploitation of natural resources and the deforestation on the island. And at one point their numbers dropped down to as low as 111 111 Rapa Nui people on the island. In the last 30 years, ecotourism has become the primary economic driver on the island and has allowed Rapa Nui people to reclaim their culture and language once again. This story is not unique to Rapa Nui. In fact, ecotourism is helping to provide economic stimulus while helping to protect environment and culture worldwide with this tourism and with the tourism industry being one of the world's fastest growing economic sectors. With gross worldwide tourism receipts growing an average of 7% from 1998 to 2008 and a 12% growth in the least developed countries for the same period. Ecotourism has the potential to be a very big driver in many countries. Ecotourism itself has four main goals. First, and obviously foremost in terms of the education of the traveler because that's what's going to drive people to continue coming to those areas. So to educate the traveler, but probably more importantly to provide funds for ecological conservation of that area. To benefit the economic development and political empowerment of local communities and to foster respect for different cultures and human rights. And so in terms of my ecotourism course, those are the four main goals that we always focus on and come back to, but certainly this is a growing area in global economy. The potential for tourism to be a driver for development within community-wide social, economic and environmental, with the community-wide social, economic and environmental impacts is so great that in 2017 the UN named it the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development. Of the 17 sustainable development goals, there are four particularly relevant ones for the Girls Inspire programs. Goal number five, which is to achieve gender equality and power all women and children. Goal eight to promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. Goal 12 to ensure a sustainable consumption and production patterns. And goal 14 to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development. Cultural heritage, cultural and creative industries, sustainable cultural tourism and cultural infrastructure can serve as the strategic tools for revenue generation. And I'll flip to that next slide. Particularly in developing countries, given their often rich cultural heritage and substantial labor force. I'll just flip to the next slide there, I think. Perfect. With low entry barrier and limited capital investment requirements, cultural-based tourism can be especially beneficial to women and girls. And certainly in terms of when we're looking at the numbers, you know, cultural and creative industries represent one of the most rapidly expanding sectors in the global economy with growth rate of 17.6% in the Middle East and 13.9% in Africa. And flipping to the next slide. Some of the other benefits of cultural-led development include greater social inclusiveness and rudeness, resilience, innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship for individuals and communities, use of local resources, skills and knowledge, strengthening of the social capital of a community, influence lifestyles, individual behavior, consumption patterns, values related to environmentalism, stewardship and interactions with the environment. Local and indigenous knowledge systems and environmental management practices provide valuable insights and tools for tracking ecological challenges, prevent biodiversity loss, reduce land degradation and mitigate effects of climate change. UN interagency projects have demonstrated the power of culture to respond to gender issues, to health and environmental concerns, and to challenges in the areas of education and livelihood. So as far as the way forward, as you consider your own specific development, sustainable development goals for your own organizations, if you haven't already, you may want to consider including some of these recommendations from the UN system task team on how to build on culture's contribution to sustainable development. So things such as integrating culture into governance, into the conception, measurement and practice of development with a view of advancing inclusive, equitable and sustainable development. Supporting sustainable cultural tourism, cultural and creative industries as a powerful economic subsector that generates decent employment, stimulates local development and fosters entrepreneurship. Cultural-led economic development should take into account the protection of cultural assets that are often fragile and constitute a unique and non-renewable capital, and things that capitalize on traditional knowledge to foster environmental sustainability. So with this, I'm going to finish the formal part of today's webinar, and I'm hoping that at this point either I could hear from you some of the questions you might have about my experiences or what I've talked about today, or I could hear from you about what types of things you're currently doing to reach your own SDGs and maybe what kind of balance challenges you're facing. Thank you very much, Jennifer, for that thought-provoking, interesting and inspiring presentation. I'm a bit overwhelmed because that was really a mouthful, but what was the best for me is that you could speak from real experiences, and it's not just you can do this or you can do that, it is we did this and this is how it's transpired into reality and this is what we learned from it. So thank you very much for making time to speak to us today to this topic. This is a very important topic in the format of learning strategic plan where our strap line emphasized the word sustainability, and you did address the three colors there, which the partners would remember I addressed in the midterm evaluation questionnaire that we sent out about social inclusion. We talked about environmental protection and economic growth, so it speaks to those three colors. So for the partners, it would be very interesting for us to hear from you how you can relate to what Jennifer was saying. We all have different environments, it's not the same exactly way she went, but I know some of you work on issues like the solar energy using the solar lanterns in Bangladesh about protecting the environment. So if you need to ask any question now, it's time to see how you can further bring the environment into the classroom or take the classroom out into the environment. Thank you, Jennifer. I think that I'll give you a chance to see that over to you. So yes, I can see there. And the chat box, there's lots of positive comments on the presentation, Jennifer. So thank you so much for sharing that. Does anyone have a specific question? If so, you can write it in the chat box or just turn on the microphone and I will call on you. Sure. So Mustafa has a question which we can post to everyone and he's just asking, to what extent does environmental sustainability issues relate to gender? Great. Thank you for the question, Mustafa. So in terms of gender, and again, I'm not an expert by any means on this subject, but certainly in terms of a lot of the, looking at the ecotourism aspect, a lot of the ecotourism opportunities do have the potential to specifically impact and benefit vulnerable populations such as women. So certainly in terms of because there's that low entry barrier for a lot of the ecotourism opportunities, certainly it is one that is much more beneficial or more open and accessible for women and children. So certainly I think that, you know, given some of the suggestions, especially from the UN, that it's very, it has the potential to benefit women and children in many ways. Perfect. Great. Thanks so much for the response. Anyone else have a question? Can you either write it in the chat box or just turn your microphone on and I'll call on you. Sure. So Sabine, I see your comment. Do you actually just want to maybe speak about it and further explain? You're saying that our culture is hard to take all the sides and their exposure is a minimum. Perhaps you want to explain more, Sabine? Oh, I see my microphone is on. Go for it. Thank you so much and it was really a very impressive presentation and a very impressive journey of Jennifer. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and I love the part where you said that I'm an outdoor person. But you know the culture we are living here, it's very important for the girls especially to go out to have an outdoor experience. We know just to go out in a way somewhere pleasant to have some like a forest or maybe to see a river and have some experience there. So it's really very hard for us like an organization or individual as well to take them there because of the cultural barriers and we have to get some consent obviously from the parents and community. So how in culture like us, how to increase their exposure of nature and especially for girls? Maybe some tips or something like that? Yeah, that's an excellent question. And again by no means I mean I've had more to say about it but I would say that for me my initial thought is you know if they're not able to go then as much as possible trying to bring it to them and bring it to where they are. And so finding ways to incorporate it into the classroom if they can't go out of the classroom. So whether that's bringing somebody in, so maybe whether it be an elder from the community or so for and I mean although our challenges are different. And oftentimes funding and things like that don't let us take students as much as we would like outside. And so yeah one of the ways I do it in my own classroom is I bring in elders from our community and have them talk about the history of the area and the culture in the area and that kind of thing. So incorporating elders or people who have a lot of traditional knowledge in the area can oftentimes infuse. You know, as much as possible bringing in firsthand experience experiences so whether it's photos that are, you know, or videos or that kind of thing that are taken by somebody that the students know oftentimes will give them a little bit more connection. So rather than just showing them a picture from a textbook or a picture from a website that they don't know who took that having pictures or stories or that kind of thing of people that they know and are familiar with. Then they have a little bit more of a buy-in right away because they know that somebody that they know has been to this location and enjoyed this location. So I guess as my biggest suggestion would be as much as possible try to bring in relevant information into the classroom so that at least they can be exposed in that way. Does that help at all? Yes, that's a really important point to bring up. Thank you both for your thoughtful decision on that. I think we have one more question. I think also on one of the things that Jennifer listed was using local resources. So that is another way of dealing with environmental protection. And I think that is one of the things that you are doing. So we should look at what are we doing at the moment, maybe make an assessment. What is it that we already do? Because sometimes we do some of these things, but we do not really realize it because we don't put that tag to it. So to become more aware about these issues, I think it is first of all to make an assessment against this presentation and say these are the advice coming out of this presentation. But what are we doing already? And then we can take it from there. What can we still do? Yes, there's another question from Mustafa. But before Mustafa's question comes up, Sharice has also something to add to the discussion. And I'll jump in, Frances, and just mentioned before we move to a different topic. You just brought up a really excellent point in terms of oftentimes I look at my own practice and I don't think I'm doing anything that special or that out of the norm or that. And so oftentimes because we're doing things and living the experience, we don't realize that we're actually doing these different things like incorporating these environmental stewardship activities into our classes and that kind of thing. And so I think that's very true of everyone that we oftentimes don't realize just how much we're doing until we take a step back and really do the reflection piece. Good point. I thank you so much Jennifer for your wonderful presentation. This is Sharice speaking here. I think there's so much to learn from your practical experiences in the field. What I am thinking and what I see actually Koyali has also brought up in the discussion about sustainable economic development and local partnerships. I think that is a really, really good point. And that speaks to the train of thought where influencing policymaking in terms of environmental protection is really important. And we need to look at what's happening within our country context and how our policymakers are thinking about and considering environmental issues. In the case of Triple S in Bangladesh in their proposal what they're addressing is the linkage between environmental conservation and how it affects women and girls. So what they found is that the more global warming happens the more the environment is affected. The more women and girls are locked out of educational opportunities because the more that they are isolated. So it influencing policymaking at the local level and at the national level is also very important. And this is where we can come in and think about how we can advocate for environmental protection and our own local context. Yes, excellent, excellent point. Okay, and some stuff I asked one question, which we can maybe make a bit more broad. It's asking how can curriculum include the environmental issue? And is that through like offering separate courses or extra assignments? Jennifer, perhaps you can just reflect on your experience with this. Yeah, definitely. So in terms of this, I don't think it has to be a whole separate course. I think sometimes if you're trying to make a separate course in environmental sustainability, the whole process of creating a new course and that kind of thing can actually be too much and therefore block the moving forward with that topic. So for me, I think it's more important to include it in the stuff that we're already doing. And so I think just as assignments or projects as part of courses that we're currently running. So that when we're giving new informations to students or we're creating activities, rather than creating a sort of a general activity, creating activities that are are more real and authentic and embedded with that information. So it's sort of woven interwoven into everything we do. I think for me, and the students that I work with, I want environmental sustainability and them having an environmental conscience to become second nature to become part of everything that they do. So that they're not having to think, OK, I'm going to turn my brain on now and think about the environment. And then I'm going to turn it off at the end of this lesson and not think about it. So I want it to become just a seamless thing that's incorporated into each and everything that they do. So for me, my suggestion and my experience would be to start by incorporating it into the classes that are already being taught so that kids realize that this is not just a something that we look at for 20 minutes and then move on that this is something that's always a part of everything that we do. OK, thanks. That's a really great response as well. I'm just going to go through one more question and then do a wrap up. And of course, if you have any more, we can always put you in touch with the speaker, Jennifer, or had these conversations on our community of practices as well to keep the discussion going. So Koyali, which Sheree's kind of message had asked if you had seen any local effective economic development partnerships happening locally to promote sustainable economic development and to what extent women were involved. So I think we can kind of open that up for anyone if you know of any example. I'll start off by saying in terms of my time in Costa Rica is probably where I've seen this the best in terms of local sort of development. As I mentioned, Monteverdi is a town of about 6000 people and the number one source of income in that town is tourism. That's the driver in that particular town. And so certainly for that town, you know, that has led to the creation of a number of different reserves in town. So there's the Monteverdi Cloud Forest Reserve is probably the most famous one, the most popular one. But there certainly is a number of different reserves that cover large tracts of land. And that's really it's quite controlled in terms of any development and that kind of thing. And so certainly in terms of the local economy, they're only able to do that because of the fact that the tourism dollar comes in and supports that industry there. To the point where they've actually they have not paved the roads to Monteverdi up until this point because they wanted to stop any large corporation development happening in that town. They wanted to make sure that the big box hotels and things like that didn't develop there and that there was more kept at a local level and that it was a local people that were running hotels and hostels and the park and that kind of thing. So for them, that was a conscious choice made by the community. And certainly in terms of the extent that in terms of women involved, obviously it's allowed a lot of, you know, a number of friends I have there. It's the woman who are running the hostels or the hotels. There's a number of female guides in the park. So there'll be, you know, interpretive guides for tourists that come into the area that kind of thing. So certainly in that particular community, ecotourism has very much been a part of the economic growth of the community, but also preservation of the local environment. Perfect. Great. Thanks so much for that really detailed example. And I think this is a question we can continue discussing on our community of practice because we can often be projects specific and I'm sure we have lots of exposure in our own careers and lives to this. So I'm going to pass it to Frances for a second time to do any concluding comments. Thank you very much, Christina. First of all, thank you so much to the audience, everybody who signed in today for the session, because we wouldn't have had a session if we didn't have participants. We have some old heads and we have some new heads. So thank you so much for joining us. I want to give a special word of thanks to Jennifer for making time and preparing and speaking to this topic so passionately, but also inspiring us to really have a look at what we are doing and try to do more. My takeaways from this is based on also the question that came up there for us to take a step back and look at what we are doing already and to develop sustainability conscience. And you know, to think about it, last year in January, after that was 2017 in January, after all my business left, our house was full of boxes, the Christmas presents and stuff and I had to take it to the Deep Depot for dropping it off. And that day it dawned on me that I'm not doing enough to protect the environment. And since that day, I had a conscious movement in my house for recycling. So we still have a far way to go, but families, as Jennifer said, is where most of our ideas start. It's mostly where we are defined by what we are doing or not. So that is one thing. And then to take it then a step forward and say, okay, we are doing this, what more can we do? And that links with Mr. Fah's question, which was an eloquently responded to by Jennifer. And I totally agree before you answer that I actually said this is one that I would suggest. And that is to mainstream the whole environment sustainability agenda in whatever we teach and not to have it as an add on, because in that case it can sometimes be, you know, it's just an afterthought. But if we mainstream it, meaning that in everything we do, we bring it into the discussion in that way we will inculcate that conscience of we have to be sensitive about how we protect our environment. And I want to conclude by saying Mr. Fah's question also provoked the other issue when he said how it relates to gender. Because last year when we had one of our observance days for girls and women, there was one where we talked about how child marriage is basically girls are at risk of child marriage because of disasters, because of natural disasters. So if a family in an area where there's floods, et cetera, they lose their house and everything. And there's a young girl, the family will look out for where is there a rich husband that can take care of us and say, okay, we marry off our daughter. So there's a direct link to the work that we are doing on sustainability and environmental protection. So girls are at risk specifically in natural disaster areas. That is what research also showed us about child marriage. So this is a very, very important topic for the work that we are doing and partners are doing a lot already. So let's vote on that and let's go back to this webinar and replay it with our, the rest of our teams in our organization. And let's have more discussions within our organizations about what more we can do. So thank you very much also to Christina who made all the arrangements and patiently contacted everybody and made follow up and really facilitate the session. And then to all of you, thank you so much and all the best and we will see you at our next webinar. Thank you also to Cheriz for your support and input to the session. Bye everybody.