Environmental Education Interflow and Co-development

With the support from The Swire Group Charitable Trust, we are so honoured to kick start a new project “Nurture via Nature: Hong Kong Nature Connectedness and Outdoor Environmental Education”! The project will include the FIRST Hong Kong territory-wide baseline survey for “children nature connectedness” and “outdoor environmental education in primary school”, along with a series of work on publicity and advocacy.

Children are also facing the same problem. The book Last Child in the Woods published in 2008, introduced the concept of "Nature-deficit Disorder," which describes how people are becoming disconnected from the natural world. This disorder can cause children to become indifferent to the environment, leading to attention problems, depression and other mental disorders, as well as increasing the risk of certain physical problems, such as myopia and obesity.

To this end, we have launched the Pledge “Engage Nature for 5”, and we invite all of you to sign it. We encourage everyone to seek out the majesty of nature using the methods we suggest, and to bask in the benefits of nature.

The enhancement and development of better implementation of environmental education in formal curriculum is urgent and imperative as we have some 10 years left to limit climate change catastrophe.

Hong Kong is now far lagging behind in the development of environmental education when compared to other developed regions. EE is being largely peripheral in local school curriculum. The mode of EE is primarily inclined to education about the environment, while education in and for the environment are lacking and need to be further developed.

In order to response to the initial recommendations of the Task Force on Review of School Curriculum, Dr. Xoni Ma, Founder and Education Director of OWLHK, has initiated and written the Hong Kong first Joint Statement on environmental education, and submitted to the Task Force. Apart from Dr. Ma’s Proposal for Hong Kong environmental education, the content of the Joint Statement is also based on opinions from various scholars and expects in environmental education.