Greening China
	A UNESCO project on education for sustainable development is teaching 200,000 Chinese schoolchildren to protect the environment

Despite summer holidays, 8-year-old Tang Jiaqi already misses her school, the Baiyun Road Elementary School in Beijing. “I really miss our handicraft workshop. We can make things on our own,” she says.

The handicraft workshop on the fifth floor of the school building is decorated with articles made by the children – cartoon animals, pencil sketches, greeting cards and cloth bags, all from old newspapers, odd bits of cloth and other waste materials. The workshop is part of the “green education centre” where pupils can watch fish and other creatures in an artificial pond and learn about water and the environment, or just sit around and take lessons about nature.

Liu Huazhou, Grade 5, says he loves to do experiments. His favourite one is to filter dirty water until it becomes clean. “It shows that waste water can be recycled and reused,” he says. Schoolmaster Jin Yanpu explains that the centre helps to cultivate an awareness of the environment in pupils, who are expected in turn to sensitize their families and neighbourhood. Pupils’ handicrafts carry environmental slogans such as “use cloth shopping bags, not plastic,” or “used batteries cause pollution”.

Yanpu introduced the environmental education programme into the school in 1998. His school is now part of a UNESCO project on education for sustainable development, running in 300 elementary and middle schools, and universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Hunan and Shandong and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. So far it has reached 200,000 students.

The project, which promotes environmental awareness, was created as an attempt to address China’s considerable pollution problems. Beijing alone is faced with increasing air and water pollution, and desertification of grazing lands in nearby provinces results in frequent sandstorms.

The project provides nationwide training for school principals, teachers and curriculum specialists. In all, some 5,000 teachers and 700 headmasters have been trained since the project started in 1997.
After more than four years of hard work, the project has begun to pay off. Students at one school made their own investigation into the city’s waste disposal system, visiting 27 dumping grounds. Their suggestions on how to improve it were highly praised by the mayor of Beijing.

Parents are also following suit. Thanks to Tang Jiaqi’s persistent nudging, her parents have stopped littering. “At the sight of litter in the street, I pick it up and put it into the dustbin,” says Tang Jiaqi. “I think some adults need environmental education too.” And the schoolchildren’s new awareness of environmental issues is inspiring local residents. “We adults indeed have much to learn from them,” says Huang Xuechun of a neighbourhood committee near the Baiyun Road Elementary School.

Contacts: Maki Hayashikawa and Sun Lei, UNESCO Beijing.
E-mails: m.hayashikawa@unesco.org and l.sun@unesco.org