Tag Archives: Students

Guest blog: Steve Frisch on Environmental Governance

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Mongolian youth look to lead on environmental governance

Mongolian Coat of Arms

Mongolian Coat of Arms

Probably the most frequent question I fielded from Mongolian students was “what can we learn from your experience that will help us leap ahead? How do we create a system that allows for economic prosperity but respects and protects the environment?”

Environmental governance is the set of rules and practices that govern the use and allocation of natural resources. These rules can be embedded in legal codes or they can be more informal, cultural and behavioral factors.

In the United States we take a well-established legal system of environmental governance for granted. US systems were established gradually as resource conflicts led to a body of law to resolve dispute. Eventually this led to the passage of the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act and numerous other regulatory policies, all studied and understood by our intrepid Mongolian students. In Mongolia, because property rights were not a founding principle of government from 1920-1990, and pressure on resources was light, many of these rules and practices were embedded in cultural values. As pressure on resources is increasing they sense the opportunity to establish a legal system that avoids many of the pitfalls of the US system.

The issue that seemed to fascinate many Mongolian students was the establishment in US law of the “public trust doctrine”, or the principle that certain resources—such as clean air and water, species, and perhaps even cultural landscapes—are public or common resources, and that government has a primary required role in maintaining them for the public’s use. While I was in Mongolia this very issue was being debated and decided by the Mongolian Supreme Court, which eventually found that citizens have a right to sue on behalf of the environment if government fails to protect it.

The other environmental governance issue that fascinated students is the idea of ecological debt. Ecological debt is the concept that the right to a healthy environment is a fundamental right, and exploitation of the planet’s resources by industrialized countries at the expense of undeveloped countries is a breach of those rights. This right is further breached by the fact we now face a global climate crisis and the only way to mitigate impacts is to de-carbonize our economies. Since industrialized nations built their wealth on cheap and abundant carbon based fuels, what debt do we owe to developing countries for monopolizing these resources?

Rapidly developing nations like India and Brazil, seeing them selves shifting from under-developed to developed nations, are hesitant to endorse rapid cuts to carbon emissions. Instead they are joining the ranks of the nations that owe the ecological debt—the group of 17 most industrialized nations who account for the vast majority of global GHG emissions—and are balking. Nations like Mongolia are saying that the wealthier developed nations ought to carry the bulk of the fiscal burden. Western and emerging economies say that the funds will need to come from taxes on the private sector and no one has the political will to make the case while their economies are still languishing under slow growth and debt crises.

I suspect that the answer probably lies with our altruistic, optimistic, innovation hungry, barrier leaping students, like those I was so fortunate to meet during my time in Mongolia, rather than the bankers, and bureaucrats who have taken over my generation.

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Guest blog: Steve Frisch on Mongolia’s Student Leaders

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“Mongolia’s student leaders aspire to leap past developed countries on climate issues”

Steve Frisch with Mongolian Student Leaders (Photo courtesy of Sierra Business Council)

Steve Frisch with Mongolian Student Leaders (Photo courtesy of Sierra Business Council)

Conversation with students and faculty at the National University of Mongolia, the oldest university in Mongolia established in 1942, and the Mongolian University of Science and Technology, was dominated by the topic of climate change and environmental governance. Students were engaged, well informed about global and local climate issues, and generally optimistic about the future. This attitude was remarkably refreshing compared to working with students in the developed world who are generally optimistic but expressing growing concern about slow progress due to lack of political will. Mongolian students are invigorated by the opportunity to plan a strategy to address climate change from the ground up, express optimism about government support, and are looking for ways to leap over barriers that have emerged in developed economies.

All of which is important, because Mongolia’s climate is undergoing radical change. A recent national analysis of temperature records shows an increase of 2.14 degree Celsius (3.85 F) since the 1940’s. Analysis by the World Wildlife Fund finds extreme weather events increasing with increased incidents of drought, cold weather events (called Dzud), heat waves, flood and sand storms. Temperatures are projected to continue to rise leading to melting glaciers that feed many Mongolian lakes and shrinking groundwater supplies affecting grazing. Finally, desertification, particularly in the Gobi region, due to shortage of water and precipitation is a serious problem.

Many of the students I spoke with experienced these extreme weather events personally. Several were from families that lost large portions of their herds in the Dzud of 2010, just one of three Dzud’s in the last decade. Temperatures dropped to minus 50 Celcius (minus 58 F) and heavy snows made grazing almost impossible, killing 50% of the livestock nationally, about 2.5 million head of goats, sheep, yak and cattle. Others from the Gobi region relay stories of dust storms and expansion of the desert driving migration to cities. Many migrants end up in temporary housing, trying to find jobs, commuting long hours, and disconnected from traditional nomadic ways of life. For many of the students, children of climate migrants, it led to a conscious decision to rapidly embrace a global economy and use education as the launching pad to opportunity and prosperity.

These factors are leading Mongolia to look for new models to help them manage adaptation and mitigation of climate change. Mongolia is a participant in the Kyoto Protocol, and has done substantive preparatory work to guide policy, including conducting a greenhouse gas emission inventory for a 1990 base year so they can measure future progress, adopting a National Action Program on Climate Change in 1999, and participating in several climate assessments over the last decade. In recent years Mongolia has undergone a process to identify and designate about 1/3 of its total landmass as permanent public lands and National Parks, modeled partly on the US system, which will allow for the large landscape resilience necessary for adaptation to occur.

Mongolian students and young people seemed uniformly anxious to get to climate solutions. They were remarkably frank about their belief that climate change skepticism is largely a western and predominantly American phenomenon.

Tomorrow: The most frequent question I fielded from Mongolian students was “what can we learn from your experience that will help us leap ahead? How do we create an environmental governance system that allows for economic prosperity but respects and protects the environment?”

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Steve Frisch: sfrisch@sbcouncil.org

October’s theme is…Youth and Sustainability!

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Members of an international team work on a plan for eliminating all carbon dioxide emissions from space travel. (Courtesy of Zero Fotografie)

Members of an international team work on a plan for eliminating all carbon dioxide emissions from space travel. (Courtesy of Zero Fotografie)

Throughout October we will be focusing the blog on issues surrounding youth and sustainability. We will explore what young people around the world are doing to make their lives more sustainable, from small, individual actions to larger projects by school groups and coalitions of students. As part of this focus, we will try and highlight youth conferences and events worldwide that will be going on the rest of 2011 and throughout 2012, in the hopes that you may find a gathering of like-minded young people to share your ideas and interests on climate change. We are looking for suggestions of youth environmental programs to alert people to, so please post in the comment section if you know of an upcoming event or are part of such a group!

Before we delve into this topic further, let’s answer the question: What is sustainability? According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),

Sustainability is based on a simple principle: Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment. Sustainability creates and maintains the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that permit fulfilling the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations. Sustainability is important to making sure that we have and will continue to have, the water, materials, and resources to protect human health and our environment.

What does sustainability have to do with climate change? It turns out the two are very closely linked. From sustainable, clean energy sources (like wind and hydropower) that reduce our use of fossil fuels and Greenhouse Gas emissions, to sustainable building of cities as populations grow, to developing strategies for sustainable resource management that ensures continued access to clean water and trees. While governments, non-profit organizations and communities around the world are tackling these issues, there is also an incredible movement of youth taking action to ensure their own lives are as sustainable as possible. By looking forward to the future: access to things like food and water, temperature and sea level rise, the increase of extreme weather events, these young people recognize the need to take action today.

What do you do in your everyday life to be more sustainable?

Students Saving Water

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A Pure Home Water representative demonstrates how to assemble a household water filter at a school in Tamale, Ghana. (Courtesy photo)

A Pure Home Water representative demonstrates how to assemble a household water filter at a school in Tamale, Ghana. (Courtesy photo)

Students around the world have recognized the need for water conservation and are taking action. From experiencing the role lakes play in the local ecosystem firsthand to taking part in innovative environmental projects that help youth put their ideas into action, these students are setting an example for everyone around the world- regardless of age.

This video gives you a glimpse into an incredible adventure for Israeli high school students spending a week at Lake Kinneret.  In conjunction with the Society of the Protection of Nature, the students see up close how the river impacts its surroundings and how important conservation is. Israel has been experiencing lower than normal rainfall for several years, which has resulted in the lake to fall below the “black line” – the line that indicates when there is not enough water to pump out to people without severely damaging the water supply. When students interact with nature and get to see exactly how they can impact something as vital as a river, both positively and negatively, it can be the catalyst for positive action. Those same students that sleep next to the rivers, under the stars, are aware of the interconnectedness of an ecosystem. This awareness makes the first step towards water conservation not only easier, but imperative.

About 5,000 kilometers away in Tamil Nadu, India, students at Kola Permual Chetty Vaishnav Senior Secondary School in India are continuing to take steps to conserve water on a school-wide level. In 2008, they won the Green I Competition sponsored by Yi Bangalore (Young Indians Bangalore), a “competition for school students [that] aims to create awareness and encourage students to think about conservation and sustainability measures that can be incorporated within their school/community for a better tomorrow.” The prize money the students won supported 8 rain water harvesting systems on the school’s campus, a roof-top garden, solar hot water generators, and a drip-irrigation system. This group of students has made real progress in reducing their school’s impact on the environment and in their water conservation efforts. They used their ingenuity, creativity, and teamwork to not only learn about different innovations they could use, but to create their own and take even greater positive action.

Has your school done anything great to help the environment? Are they doing something now? From recycling and composting programs to installing solar panels, when students work together they can make incredible changes not just in water conservation, but in all areas of the environment.