By Senashia Ekanayake
The world we live in is fast depleting and dying in front of our eyes. 15-year olds take centre stage while 70+ year olds gamble their remaining lives away. A paradigm shift is happening, but where there is not so much power, how do we go about achieving sustainable change? Small movements are happening and small changes are being done but is all of it truly enough?
As a communicator, it’s important that I try to use the voice I have and platforms available to talk about what’s happening albeit even a bit late in the day, and here are a few of the things we ought to be reading.
Disaster Preparedness Drill with Community
[Bangladesh] Bangladesh Environment And Development Society conducted a drill involving community people to better prepare them for unprepared disasters and natural calamities. The community covered all aspects of disaster preparation including, pre-disaster, during disaster preparedness: receiving the signal from the radio, disseminating the alert to the community using siren and/or megaphone; gathering children, disable persons and pregnant women in a van to the cyclone centre, the steps needed to rescue an endangered person, how to provide basic first aid to an injured person and how to remain in the cyclone centre until the disaster has passed.
Workshop on National Implementing Entity Establishment for Green Climate Fund in Afghanistan
[Afghanistan] In order to mobilise climate finance in the country, The National Environment Protection Agency, Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan invited CANSA to organise an NIE establishment readiness and preparatory support workshop. CANSA roped in climate finance readiness experts from India and Sri Lanka to conduct the two days’ workshop in Kabul on 23rd-24th April 2019. Other partners of the workshop included the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO) and Tadbeer Consulting. The purpose of the workshop was to bring high-level authorities and technical representatives of the government together with representatives from civil society, UN agencies, public and private banks, academia and media to initiate the establishment of NIE of Afghanistan.
How Green is our Budget?
[Sri Lanka] In March 2019, SLYCAN Trust hosted a dinner discussion to discuss the proposals in budget 2019 to identify how environment and climate-friendly they are. The panellists and discussants for the discussion included: Prof Ranjith Bandara, from the University of Colombo; Hemantha Withanage, from the Centre for Environmental Justice; Heminda Jayaweera, SLYCAN Trust & Venture Frontier, Sri Lanka; Milinda Rajapaksha, Municipal Council of Colombo, Trishan Perera, Young Professionals Organisation of the UNP; Uchita De Soyza, Centre for Environment and Development and Charana Kanankegamage, Attorney-at-Law.
Striking for the future
[Via SCMP] They come from secondary schools and universities in Australia, Bangladesh, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, and will join their peers in the Americas and Europe to take part in the Global Strike for Future.
“We are the ones who will inherit this Earth. We deserve to have a say about the kind of future we have, which at this stage could be non-existent unless we stand up and show the politicians how important this is to us,” said 18-year-old Sophie Handford, who has completed high school and is coordinating the strikes in New Zealand.
The protest comes a month after about 10,000 youngsters staged a nationwide school strike across 60 cities in Britain, showing how a grass roots movement inspired by a Swedish girl last summer had taken off.
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Senashia Ekanayake is the Communications Officer at Climate Action Network South Asia.
