Zayed Sustainability Prize
Massive Congratulations to the Enviroschools team for being selected as finalists in the Zayed Sustainability Prize in the Global High Schools’ category for the East Asia and Pacific region.
This is an extremely prestigious award and the school is very excited and honoured to be a finalist.
Established in 2008, the Zayed Sustainability Prize was created to honour the legacy of the UAE’s founding father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and his pioneering commitment to global sustainability and humanitarian development. By recognising pioneering solutions and technologies that can change the world, the Zayed Sustainability Prize, rewards innovators and visionaries whose achievements have furthered the global proliferation of innovative, impactful and inspirational sustainability solutions.
Our Enviroschools group put in a lot of hard work throughout the year to achieve this and are very proud to have been selected. Our project involves creating a hub for research around Innovative and Sustainable Education. This will be an environment where we do research into renewable energy and other initiatives and create a Citizen Science Research centre in conjunction with our local tertiary institutions and partner schools, where we already have existing links and contacts. Our school will work with these groups to research and pilot sustainable energy-use and other projects in the school setting and then invite other schools and partners to share in and develop this knowledge. We also aim to become leaders in recycling practices, sustainable food production, urban biodiversity and sustainable design. Our school is developing a Classroom by the Sea adjacent to the Otago Harbour where we hope to develop wind and water energy projects as well as climate monitoring. As the lead school in this project we hope to create change with the young people within our community as we engage in learning about world-class, leading edge sustainable practices.
Our proposal includes kinetic energy tiles which generate electricity by footfall at school and a wind turbine and solar energy panels for our school and the Classroom by the Sea. We are also proposing rainwater collection tanks and climate monitoring equipment.
Lucy Davidson and Brynn McBurney will represent the group at the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week and Zayed Sustainability Prize Award Ceremony in Abu Dhabi in early 2020. It is a wonderful tribute to the efforts of the group this year to drive positive sustainable initiatives in the school and we are inspired by the energy and commitment of our younger students coming through. If you want to join us in Enviroschools come along to S62 lunchtimes on Tuesdays. Everyone is welcome.