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EAD affirms commitment to building environmentally conscious society

Image for EAD affirms commitment to building environmentally conscious society

The Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi, EAD, today announced new and updated plans targeting various sectors of the Abu Dhabi community, as part of its environmental educational and awareness programmes.

The move marks the agency’s 20th anniversary since launching the programmes, which now includes an E-learning platform, the first free and collaborative e-learning tool exclusively dedicated to the environmental sector in the emirate.

Another initiative set to launch is the ‘Youth Environmental Programme’. According to EAD, the programme seeks to empower the UAE youth to act as guardians of their natural environment, by providing them with training experience and opportunities to shadow experts in the field.

From humble beginnings with the ‘Nature Bus’ in 1998, today, EAD delivers environmental education programmes to over 85 percent of Abu Dhabi’s government and private schools. Its Sustainable Schools Initiative and the Sustainable Campus Initiative are award-winning programmes that aim to engage students as agents for environmental change.

EAD will also launch the ‘Green Stars System’, an alternative to the ‘Sustainable Schools Awards’, to evaluate the performance of schools participating in the ‘Sustainable Schools Initiative’ where they have successfully implemented the four components of the initiative.
Schools participating in the ‘Leadership Schools Category’ will also be provided with financial support worth AED10,000 to help them transfer the acquired experience in the field of sustainability to the newly participating schools in the initiative.

Commenting on the announcement, Dr. Shaikha Salem Al Dhaheri, EAD’s Secretary-General, said, "Through the integrated approach that we adopted in targeting the various groups of society, we were able to achieve a qualitative shift in the level of awareness about important environmental issues, which contributed to raising the overall level of environmental awareness from 44 percent to 82 percent from 2012 to 2018.

"Positive behaviour towards the environment also increased from 55 percent to 79 percent during the same period, which contributed to achieving the vision of the Abu Dhabi government to create an environmentally educated society," she added.
Another long-running and popular educational programme is the ‘Enviro-Spellathon’, which was established in association with Emirates Nature-WWF, where today more than 1.8 million students across the UAE are actively a part of.

To promote environmental citizenship, EAD will also launch the ‘Clean Abu Dhabi’ application, which will provide an opportunity for the community of Abu Dhabi, of different age groups, to collect and record data on plastic materials and single-use waste found on the beaches.