Ended soon
Blog post by ISC’s Senior Program Officer Elaine Wang
We spend lots of time at ISC on big concepts – sustainability, resilience, adaptation and mitigation – but it’s in the field that we see these concepts made real and visible. Our China team just sent a whole set of photos from recent site visits that really give a flavor of the good things local organizations, with help from ISC, are doing every day.
Kids They are a reason to create solutions, and they are such a terrific part of the solution. Here, EcoCanton holds a public environmental education activity.
Clean energy The Xiaolan Low Carbon Promotion and Development Service Center is creating residential rooftop solar demonstrations to encourage their uptake in a relatively affluent community. We’ve worked with the Xiaolan Center since 2011, and their capacity, commitment, and results are growing all the time.
Citizen engagement Government, even in China, can’t do it alone – here, social organization Shahe and ISC train a neighborhood committee to conduct a baseline waste survey so that they can strategically increase recycling rates.
Who says recycling can’t be fun? Below Shahe trains the neighborhood residents – showing them which materials go where to increase the purity of the recycling stream.
A different organization, New Life, engages neighborhood volunteers in water quality monitoring. Who could resist the outfit? Those are ISC ballcaps, by the way – everyone wanted them!
Clean water Chinese regulators do not have adequate monitoring systems, meaning sources of pollution are sometimes too poorly understood to be managed. New Life, a very young organization that ISC has helped nurture, created a water quality monitoring initiative that last year identified the source of pollution for one tributary of the Pearl River, which is helping the water treatment company design an appropriate intervention to reduce that pollution. We are now supporting them to organize residents along 3 other tributaries.
Below, New Life volunteers take river water samples.
Families Art can foster love for the environment in young and middle-aged alike, and art is increasingly becoming part of the way people engage with the environmental challenges they’re facing.
New Life’s intrepid executive director educates a crowd about the importance of water quality and why monitoring matters.
Ecological literacy China’s development has been truly breathtaking. From a primarily agrarian society a few decades ago, possibly half of China’s children now don’t know where their food comes from. (Sound familiar?) Rice Harmony conducts a variety of activities that help urban families learn about their food, as well as about the farmers who grow their food, as a way to reconnect them with the natural world.
A child shows off his postcard with his thank-you message to rice farmers.
These photos remind all of us here at ISC why we do what we do. And I hope they remind you that there are people everywhere, working every day, to improve their environments.