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World saved – in 20 minutes
Ian Chambers Photo: Questacon
Students rise to the challenge of big questions about the environment for Australia and everyone else as they Plan for the Planet.
Ian Chambers interviewed by James Wells
Who is more qualified to tackle climate change, politicians or high school students?
The answer may depend on the elected official in question. But the Australian National University’ s Ian Chambers, a senior researcher at the Crawford School of Public Policy, argues teens could teach the politicians a thing or two about environmental sustainability.
Chambers is directing the pilot Young Australians Plan for the Planet, which involves year 10 and 11 students from 20 schools around Australia using business planning to develop a national sustainability policy out to the year 2050. While planning for the project, Chambers tested the students’ knowledge about climate change, sustainable development and associated policy. He was pleasantly surprised.
“ I [ said to ] the students, who had never seen any of this business planning approach before,‘ You’ ve got 20 minutes to come up with a solution; what would you do about the problems facing the Great Barrier Reef?” Chambers recounted.“ They covered 80 per cent of what needs to happen on the reef [ based on what a major research report has identified ]. That, for me, was a strong litmus test of how well young people grasp these issues.”
The students will have expert support as they craft their plan. Chambers said as it will probably generate a practical outcome, as it is being crafted as a business plan. In 12 months, these students will present their proposal to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, as part of next year’ s National Science Week. It’ ll also be available online as an open-source document.
Here, Chambers discusses how the pilot program has come together and the importance of what the students can achieve.
CR: Can you tell us about the Young Australians Plan for the Planet program?
IC: This was initiated by a couple of things. One is the release of a book I co-authored with John Humble that was published several years ago, called Plan for the Planet. It was a business planning approach to tackling the global challenges we’ re facing at the moment. It looked at using the approaches we take in business, which are effective at driving change in global businesses. It was fairly clear when we looked at the situation around the planet that there are a many challenges we are facing. Many people want to take them on, but we aren’ t well organised.
I was working in corporations and basically looked at how global companies got organised around the world. We applied those principles and that became Plan for the Planet.
Then several months ago, a number of different groups, including Questacon, United Nations Information Center, and Inspiring Australia, looked at the work we’ d done in the book and became interested in working together on teaching best principles and practices in schools with sustainable outcomes.
We started looking at a national program to do that. That has become Young Australians’ Plan for the Planet. The pilot will involve 20 schools, which will operate over the next nine to 12 months. There will be 20‘ eco-zones’ – so ecological and economic zones – which will cover the whole of Australia. Each school will have about a dozen students, all doing extracurricular work to develop a sustainability plan out to 2050 for their eco-zone. Then those 20 plans will be rolled into a single national plan, which will be presented to the prime minister in 12 months. That’ s the program in a nutshell; it’ s been developed by a group of organisations. The
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