Information You Can Use: A Bi-monthly Service for the UN and Civil Society
Volume 2, Issue 2, March - April 2005
Conference seeks to drive home environmental
responsibility
Gathering aims to help develop sense of duty
Source: The Daily Star
Lebanon
By: Nada Bakri
March 31, 2005
BEIRUT: Arab and Mediterranean environmentalists met Wednesday to issue the "Environmental Citizenship Declaration," a regional environmental education program directed toward public management and protection of the environment.
The environmentalists met during a conference entitled "the Arabic Mediterranean Conference for the Environmental Citizenship" organized by Amwaj (or Waves), a non-governmental environmental organization, in collaboration with the Arab NGO Network for the Environment and Development (RAED) and the Lebanese Environment Format (LEF).
The conference was sponsored by the Arab League and funded by the German Frederich Ebbert Stiftung Institute.
"The objective of this conference is to issue an environmental citizenship declaration to help the Arabic and Mediterranean public to manage and protect their environment," said Malek Ghandour, secretary general of Amwaj.
"The idea behind environmental citizenship is to encourage the sense that each of us is an integral part of a larger ecosystem and that our future depends on embracing a common challenge and acting responsibly and positively toward our environment," he added.
General Coordinator of RAED, Imad Adly said: "It is now imperative to reach beyond the traditional environmental constituencies and find ways of engaging other sectors of society so that they too can exercise their environmental responsibilities."
He said: "environmental citizenship is about asserting the ethical responsibilities of individuals, organizations, countries and corporations to create new forms of solidarity that will protect all life on earth."
He added environmental concerns can empower citizens to influence governments and the private sector toward attaining more environmentally sound and equitable patterns of production and consumption.
He also said the objective of environmental education is to generate "awareness and knowledge to help individuals and social groups acquire a basic understanding of the total environment, its associated problems and the critical role humanity plays in its survival."
Environmental education, he added, also aims to help the public acquire social values, strong feelings of concern for the environment and the motivation to actively participate in its protection and improvement. It also aims to help people acquire those skills needed to solve environmental problems.
"We also aim to aid people in their development of a sense of responsibility and urgency regarding environmental problems. This is the best way of ensuring people take appropriate action to solve those problems as well as an evaluation ability to assess environmental measures and education programs in terms of ecological, political, economic, social, aesthetical and educational factors," he said.
The NGOs participating in the conference will raise public awareness through an array of publications, accords, guidelines, program, data bases, and other products.