Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) or Environmental Education is one of the first priority in 21st century for human.
Global and local environmental issues are becoming severer year by year, which you may find by considering about many phenomena, which are considered to be attributed by global climate change and other environmental issues. Mary of the causes of them are considered at the results from human activities. From these facts, it is important for children to know about those phenomena themselves and also about the reasons, as well as about how to respond by themselves. This leads to the importance of teaching "management" of their behavior to children, individually and also as a group.
It is also important for human to have concepts of working together, locally and globally. This can be understood by considering about the fact that one country cannot stop the increase of green house gases on the earth to stop the global warming.
Considering from those, the environmental education for children should
contain at least following items:
- To develop the sensitivity of children to feel good or bad environment,
which leads to motivate and to develop the environmental awareness of children
- To understand the mechanism of the nature and its sustainability
- To understand the impact of human activity of the nature
- To learn about how to manage the human activity to reduce its impact
- To make practice to work together locally and globally to reduce the
impact of human on nature
gKidsf EMS Programme" has Programme described here started by ArTech in Japan in 2000, and after agreement between ArTech and ISO, this programme is called as "Kids' ISO 14000 Programme". Now, more than 100,000 children participated by 2005, and it is expanding internationally through UN organizations such as UNU, UNEP and UNESCO and international organization as ISO.
gKidsf ISO 14000h Programme covers the
following items as an environmental education programme;
1. To stimulate environmental awareness of children
2. To teach and make practice of methodology of environmental management to
children -PDCA cycle-, which has been used in ISO14001 for adults.
3. To make experience of working together through group, networks locally
and globally.
Combination of gKidsfISO14000h Programme and some of the other environmental education programme makes large synergetic effects.
It is also important to understand that this is a programme system, so
that totality is one of the essential points to implement to obtain good
educational effects. It is also essential to obtain understanding and the
support this programme by educational authorities, since this programme
makes effective implementation when it goes into school system.
One of the biproducts of the Kids' ISO 14000 Programme is stimulation and
increase of environmental awareness of "the family members" through
the activities of children in the home.
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