YED Awards To Promote Environmental Awareness Among Youths
Jake Ten
Thursday, 05 April 2012
Bandar Seri Begawan – The Youth Eco-Documentary (YED) Awards, organised in conjunction with the National Environment Conference, is now open for application.
The Youth Eco-Documentary. Awards is organised by Asia Inc Forum, in partnership with HSBC, TOTAL, Butra HeidelbergCement and Alcoa, and in collaboration with the Science Technology and Environment Partnership (STEP) Centre, Ministry of Education, Brunei Darussalam, International School of Brunei and Jerudong International School.
The competition is open to all high schools and sixth form institutions in Brunei and winners will be announced at the National Environment Conference on June 20.
The theme behind the YED Awards, ‘Our Resources, Our Future’, is held with the aim of recognising the contribution of youths in promoting conservation, environmental awareness and stewardship.
This initiative gives the youths of Brunei the opportunity to demonstrate their creativity, as well as critical thinking, in identifying environmental problems that impact Brunei, all compacted in the form of a two and a half minute video documentary.
The categories include Best Proposal (regarding solutions of the identified problems), Most Entertaining Video and Best Production. Videos will be judged based on different set of criterias for each category including environmental vision, influence, level of innovation, clarity of message and so on.
Fatin Arifin, Programmes and Research Executive, Asia. Inc Forum, said, “We believe that awareness of environmental issues that affect us such as wastage, litter, water shortage, deforestation, excessive consumption, population explosion and global warming alone is not enough.
The urgency of our situation does not afford us to take the present situation for granted. Therefore young people need to think critically about their role in environmental stewardship.”
Sarimah Abu Bakar, Acting Head of the STEP Centre, Ministry of Education, added, “Impact of our wrong steps may affect lives of human and other living things, not just within our immediate surrounding but also globally.
It’s also something we cannot hide and we may suffer because of that.”
In line with our initiative on education for sustainable development (ESD), we would encourage students to participate in the competition, not only to win awards, but as a way of sharing and contributing ideas and actions to protect our precious environment.
—Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin