When they were just 12 and 10 years old, Meliti and Isabel Wijsen, two young Balinese girls, have created one of the largest youth groups in their country against plastic pollution. Together with other members of the movement and after 6 years of campaigning, they managed to obtain a ban on single-use plastic bags in Bali. They focus on education and raising general awareness as well as collaborating with other likeminded people. They continue their work today by empowering more young people, business leaders and the government to ensure the implementation of the regulation happens.
All of Bye Bye Plastic Bags teams around the world are led by young people coming up with many unique and different ways of creating change such as beach clean-ups, educational workshops, and campaigns to empower local communities against single-use plastic.
There is no proper waste management systems in place, especially in Bali, Indonesia, where the project is based and therefore they saw a huge problem of large amounts of plastic ending up in natural ecosystems, notably: the ocean, beaches, rivers and rice-fields. The amount of plastic entering the ocean will grow from 11 million metric tons to 29 million metric tons each year over the next 20 years.
– Bali has implemented a ban on single-use plastic usage.
– Bye Bye Plastic Bags has become a living example that kids can do things and be responsible with more than 50 global teams to prove it.
– A social enterprise was started to empower local women to produce alternative bags.
– Hosting of an annual symbolic “Bali’s Biggest Clean Up” event mobilizing close to 60.000 people over 430 locations on the island and collecting 155 tons of plastic.
The main impacted area is Bali, where single-use plastic bags were banned. Bye Bye Plastic Bags has impacted Bali and fifty other locations around the world where their teams are based. Through their work, a lot of young people across the globe got inspired by the work of Bye Bye Plastic Bags and joined the teams present around the world. Women are also one of the impacted populations, by creating a social enterprise for them to produce alternative bags in Bali.
Over the last 7 years, Bye Bye Plastic Bags has come across many challenges such as funding needs and knowledge needs.
As a youth led movement, they depend a lot on volunteers. However, there is a core group that organises the logistics. They welcome any donations, expertise, and volunteers !
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) equips young people with knowledge, skills, values and attitudes be resilient…
UNESCO is launching the Trash Hack campaign to encourage young people to learn…
In order to save biodiversity, Djibone Sissoko mobilises young people to stop bushfires from spreading in Mali and educates inhabitants from his commune Kita-Ouest about the dangers these fires pose for animals and for the environment. He acts to raise awareness among small farmers and their families about the harmful effects that bushfires can have if poorly managed, devastating fauna and flora in their path.
Friends Sam Teicher and Gator Halpern have co-founded Coral Vita, a high-tech coral farming solution to protect the dying reefs in The Bahamas and around the world. Through high-impact coral reefs restoration, Coral Vita helps preserve reefs for future generations while spurring the blue economy’s growth locally and globally.
Coral Vita’s land-based farms integrate breakthrough methods to accelerate coral growth up to 50x (micro fragmenting) while enhancing their resiliency to warming and acidifying oceans (assisted evolution). Coral Vita’s model scales: one land-based farm can potentially supply an entire nation’s reefs with sufficient capital investment.
Alongside this novel form of high-tech coral farming, Coral Vita is deploying an innovative for-profit model to sustain large-scale restoration. Given reefs’ tremendous value, they are working to transition restoration to a commercial industry. This unique model facilitates revenue generation and better scalability than any current restoration practitioners. Coral Vita sells reef restoration as a service to customers that depend on reefs’ benefits. As the farms grow diverse, resilient, and affordable coral for restoration projects, they also function as eco-tourism attractions and education centres. Guests pay to visit the farms, where they learn about the importance of protecting reefs, and how they can help, including by adopting coral or planting them with Coral Vita’s teams and local dive shops. Students, fishermen, and community members also visit the farm to build local capacity for future jobs in the blue economy, and Coral Vita emphasizes hiring locally as much as possible.
Patrick Kilonzo Mwalua is acting to tackle a fundamental problem: water scarcity in wildlife zones!
The project is all about water for wildlife as one way of conservation and reducing human-wildlife conflict for competing for the same water resource. Indeed, as the number of conflicts between humans and wild animals started to rise due to water scarcity, Patrick decided to bring in an efficient solution through re-watering the dry wildlife zones. Moreover, Patrick is also looking for innovative methodologies to make sure that animals have plenty of water into the wildlife zones.
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