Ignore ecology at your peril
Professor Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak
My View - The Sun Daily
December 6, 2016
TWO articles that are a cause of utmost anxiety about the environment were published last week. First, temperatures in the Arctic have been so much above the average that it is “altering the ecology of the Arctic Ocean on a huge scale”.
This is likely to have a profound effect on animals in the higher food chain, including birds, seals, polar bears and whales. Although what this exactly looks like for the future is still uncertain, there is enough cause for concern.
In the other article, “Heat kills vast stretch of Australia’s coral”, scientists said up to hundreds of miles of the Great Barrier Reef had suffered the worst coral die-off recorded after being bathed this year in warm waters that bleached and then weakened the coral.
It is said to be the third such bleaching event known to strike the reef along almost the entire eastern Queensland, listed as a national World Heritage Site by Unesco.
Bleaching refers to the “expulsion” of tiny algae that give the coral its colour. The algae will return to recolonise the coral, only if the water cools quickly enough. Otherwise, the damaged reef tends to flatten out, losing habitat and species diversity.
Such warnings resonate well with the discussion at the 10th Global RCE Conference co-organised by the United Nations University (UNU) and Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Jogjakarta at the end of last month.
RCE refers to Regional Centres of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) that numbered more than 150 around the world. A brainchild of UNU at the start of the UN’s ESD Decade in 2005, it pioneered the concept with seven initial RCEs worldwide, which included Universiti Sains Malaysia before it clinched the Apex status in 2008.
Malaysia has two other RCEs based in University of Malaya and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The RCEs are tasked to transform education, notably higher education, by mainstreaming ESD in tandem with the global aspiration that was endorsed recently at the UN General Assembly as part of its post-2015 agenda for the next 15 years (2016-2030). It mirrors the “Education 2030” declaration made at the World Education Forum in Incheon, May 2015.
That the theme of the conference focused on “engaging local communities to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” has far reaching implications because it invariably means that the mission of the institutions involved must themselves be community-oriented and even community-based.
This is best exemplified by UGM which has a well-developed community programme and activities involving no less than 7,000 of its student and staff population at any one time. During the conference, UGM (which is also an RCE) impressively showcased them in a number of field trips ranging from successful “river-cleaning” activities led by various communities to a local hand-painted batik based on a social entrepreneurial model involving more than 1,200 trained members of the community.
In other words, the RCEs are endowed to leverage bottom up support to meet the set major target in ensuring that by 2030, all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.
This is indeed a far cry from the present mantra of employment and graduate marketability that seem to preoccupy our mind-sets. To make it worse, no Malaysian industrial sector has come anywhere close to articulating the above target in its cry for employment and employability.
The situation is even worse in private higher education institutions that have shown little (if any) interest in ESD as the way forward since there is essentially no “big” money to be made from such endeavours relative to the so-called “marketable” courses. Moreover it is not as easy.
To quote a document “Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, by 2030 all countries are expected to achieve the SDGs that are not only “transformative and universal” but also “integrated and indivisible”.
In this context, it is not an understatement to say that we are lagging behind in such a “transformative” discourse which is differently defined from that of the Education Blueprints which just missed the pronouncement of the UN post-2015 global agenda.
Like the challenges of Wawasan 2020 that are starkly “ecologically blind”, the blueprints too suffer from the same deficit that we cannot simply ignore. It is imperative that the gaps be quickly closed by leveraging on Malaysia’s existing RCEs, rather than imposing yet another model that is alien to the local community by and large.