HOW THE GOLD COAST COMMUNITY EVOLVED WITH EC3 GLOBAL
It is broadly recognised that communicating the message of sustainability to the wider community is a difficult task.
A large majority of the population struggle to understand the meaning of the term, as well as how it is applicable to their everyday lives. To combat this, Gold Coast City Council, along with EC3 Global’s Earthcheck system and its majority owner, the Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre, developed a sustainability education programme for students from grades 5-10. This programme, titled ‘The Sustainability Challenge’, introduces students to the broad themes of environmental responsibility as well as how they can integrate this into their daily household habits.
The Sustainability Challenge is a web based education programme which uses the Earthcheck benchmarking system to monitor and find the best ways to reduce a household’s production of energy, water and waste. Students are required to benchmark their own homes environmental performance, research sustainability options and set household goals to improve their performance.
The curriculum was devised so that school children would be actively involved in learning about sustainability issues. At the community level, the Sustainability Challenge has provided a mechanism through which school children are directly educated on the concept and issues of sustainability and provided with the tools and knowledge to actively measure, monitor and implement strategies to improve the sustainability footprint in their own households.
The concept of working with schools and particularly teachers as the agents to guide the programme had the added bonus of providing a cost effective way for the Gold Coast City Council to gather information on household resource consumption and ecological impact. It was also an extremely effective way to communicate through the wider community the benefits of sustainability practices.
Gold Coast Mayor Ron Clark, a keen supporter of the initiative and its positive educational outcomes, believes “the challenge facing all communities is to learn to live more sustainably and this programme has been an important step for our city in that direction. The Earthcheck Schools programme helped benchmark the city in terms of energy, water and waste. This information can now become a guide to household behaviour which will help all levels of government to improve their environmental-education programmes and messages.”
The pilot project was initially trialled with 13 Gold Coast schools and its success has paved the way for the next generation of the sustainability challenge to be introduced into other community education programmes, both locally and internationally.
The below table indicates the savings that were made by the Council as part of its adoption of the Sustainability Challenge:
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Reduce ENERGY consumption by
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1,800,000,000 megajoules
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Reduce Carbon Dioxide production by
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490,000 tonnes
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This is equivalent to Gold Coast City with
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62,000 fewer houses
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Reduce WATER consumption by
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16,000,000 kilolitres
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Reduce Carbon Dioxide production by
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13,000 tonnes
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This is equivalent to Gold Coast City with
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2,000 fewer houses
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Reduce WASTE generation by
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810,000 cubic metres
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Reduce Carbon Dioxide production by
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220,000 tonnes
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This is equivalent to Gold Coast City with
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28,000 fewer houses
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OVERALL reduce Carbon Dioxide Production by
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900,000 tonnes
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This is equivalent to Gold Coast City with
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92,000 fewer houses
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