Building Environmental Awareness in Teens
More than 300 teens enrolled in the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program around the world will gather at the University of British Columbia (UBC) to consider how the landscape of environmental awareness is changing.
A five day conference, ‘The New Green: Making Things Better, Not Just Less Bad,’ organized by the IB and UBC, will be held at the university’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) from Monday, July 23 to Friday, July 27. The event is open to all students enrolled in the IB’s Diploma Program; over 300 participants from 37 countries are registered to attend.
The focus of the conference is ‘regeneration,’ sustainability strategies that go beyond harm-reduction and look to achieve actual improvement in environmental systems. The conference location, UBC’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) is one of the world’s greenest buildings and is sustainably designed to have a net-positive energy consumption impact on the environment.
Participants will hear from keynote speakers at the cutting edge of sustainability thinking, including CIRS Director, Dr. John Robinson, environmental activist, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, international philanthropist, John McCall McBain and National Geographic photographer, Paul Nicklen, as well as UBC students.
The students will have the opportunity to get involved themselves, by using advanced interactive technology to investigate different models for achieving regeneration around the globe. Feedback for their efforts will be excitingly immediate; the CIRS modeling technology is capable of running proposed solutions and playing them out in real-world conditions. If successful, this empowering simulation will show how today’s good decisions can lead to significant benefits tomorrow.
Twenty-one students won scholarships sponsored by donors through the auspices of the International Baccalaureate. A World Student Conference organized around the theme of social entrepreneurship was held earlier in July at IE University in Segovia, Spain.
IB World Student Conference Program: http://ibwsc2012.sites.olt.ubc.ca/program/ Twitter Hashtag: #IBWSC12
