Short report from CO2nnect at UNESCO’s World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development
(For a pdf-version of this report, click here)
The World Conference on ESD took place in Bonn, Germany, March 31st to April 2nd, 2009. It brought together 900 participants from 147 countries. The conference was organized by UNESCO and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, in cooperation with the German Commission for UNESCO.
CO2nnect was one of the 25 selected projects for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) invited to the conference exhibition. Astrid Sandås, Norwegian Directorate of Education and Training, was therefore part of the Norwegian delegation present at the conference. The CO2nnect exhibition stand was visited by several
delegates and Astrid Sandås had many good talks with representatives from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Hungary, India, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Sweden, the UK, USA, Venezuela and more.
Most of those Astrid Sandås spoke to expressed a genuine interest in CO2nnect. Some of the positive feedback included:
- Two representatives would pull strings to have the website translated into their respective languages.
- The Peruvian representative told Astrid there were about 100 schools ready to report on CO2nnect and a representative
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A delegate from India showed an overview of over 200 schools that had carried out the activity but who did not have access to the internet to report results to
the database. - The representative from the US was certain that American schools would participate in CO2nnect.
Visitors to the CO2nnect exhibition stand could watch a PPT-presentation about the school campaign (available here ). Those interested could also go on the internet to visit www.co2nnect.org live. There were also flyers given out aobut CO2nnect as well as a first announcement about the SUPPORT project's final conference, titled "The school as learning organisation for Education for Sustainable Development", which will take place in Bergen, Norway, April 19-23, 2010.
The spontaneous feedback of everyone introduced to CO2nnect was positive. The teacher guide was very popular and is already posted on UNESCO's German website.
For more information about the conference, see http://www.esd-world-conference-2009.org/ or read the March 2009 edition of the UNESCO's quarterly newsletter about the Decade for ESD (here).