Wear your climate change glasses!
Inspired during Empower Youth for Work's first Global Learning Event, Toma Saha explores the role of Climate Change and her work as Youth officer in the Bangladesh team. "It became clear how essential it is to identify, create and support companies that offer ‘green jobs’ and establish safe, climate friendly products and technologies".
Climate change is one of the most critical global challenges, and its impact ranges from affecting agriculture, food security, livelihood, water quality, intensity of natural disasters, spread of vector-borne diseases, and biodiversity. It is widely accepted that if we do not take appropriate measure to combat Climate change, it will create high levels of ambiguity about our future. For us the undeniable fact is: we will leave the Earth for our children, young people and future generations.
The Empower Youth for Work project of Oxfam is working for improving the economic and social empowerment for young women and men living in rural climate-change affected areas’. Being part of the Bangladesh project team, I got the opportunity to learn about the climate change initiatives of this project. I dream of a group of young climate leaders who will be climate heroes in their area. Especially, what makes me happy about this project, is the scope of agency creation, economic engagement and policy level advocacy through climate actions.
The EYW Global Learning Event
During the recent global learning event, the four countries- Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and Ethiopia- shared their concerns about this issue. Through this project, in Bangladesh we are providing soft skill training which includes the knowledge of climate change. Besides, each country is planning to provide skills and knowledge on adaptation and mitigation technologies.
During the learning event, I have also learned about various economic opportunities in the climate change sector, for example, engineer or technician of water, solar, biogas; resilient cropping; and organic farming. Besides, I would like to appreciate the opportunity of initiating climate friendly or green enterprises. I was very much inspired by examples of innovative business cases. Particularly, the business case of Solar Mama was an eye opener, as it was about how a female became a technician of photovoltaic panel.
From the event, I got a strong feeling that when the youths will be aware of the challenges and opportunities that comes along with climate change, they can take part in different dialogues on solutions and take action to combat climate change.
Climate change: a cross cutting issue
Climate change is a crosscutting issue and we need to consider the impact and resilience of the issue in any kind of development initiative. At the Global Learning Event green coloured giant sunglasses were used throughout the week to return to the issue of climate change. My takeaway from the event is to keep wearing these climate change glasses andstart thinking from the resilient perspective in every building block of the programme.
In my opinion, the four countries within the EYW project have similar kind of challenges, and one country can learn from the best practices of other countries. For instance, youth are not only to work for their personal development, but also for developing a network and mechanisms that will develop their society, make the environment resilient, and contribute to sustainable development within their community, country as well as globally.
Furthermore, if youth become the change makers and they can set examples, then the community will have faith in them and they can play an effective role in driving the community towards a sustainable as well as a peaceful future. Therefore, youth will be able to make the planet safe for themselves and for the future generations as well.
Read more on the Global Learning event here