The Ministries of Environment and Education have jointly launched Rs 26 million project on "Environmental Education Promotion at School and College Level" with the objective to integrate environmental concepts in the formal education system at the primary, middle, secondary and higher secondary levels in all districts of Pakistan.
It aims to inculcate environmental awareness in Pakistan, which has been termed as one of the key factors contributed to rapid degradation of environment and the ensuing poverty in the country.
The project will target more than 200,000 educational institutions and 26 million students throughout the country and will introduce core environment subjects as part of the syllabus from grade one to twelve.
The project aims at bringing attitudinal and behavioural changes in young people to better understand conservation and sustainable development.
The project was developed under the UNDP and donor funded National Environmental Action Plan - Support Programme (NEAP-SP), which is being implemented by the Ministry of Environment to facilitate the implementation of the National Environmental Action Plan.
The project is expected to contribute to promotion of sustainable development in Pakistan through improving and skills knowledge of students to address the environmental challenges.
The project is a major step towards realisation of environmental education related objectives of the National Conservation Strategy, which calls for strengthening the educational curricula at all levels so as to produce practitioners of sustainable development and environmental protection.
The main components of the four-year project, which is being funded by the Swiss Agency for Development Co-operation (SDC) in Pakistan, included situation analysis of the current state of environmental education in the curricula/textbooks at primary, middle, secondary and higher secondary levels.
It will entail the development of curriculum contents on environmental education for each level and the development of lesson contents on environment in line with environmental education curricula.
This will require revision and updating of existing textbooks incorporating material on environment.
The project will assist in the capacity building of Curriculum Wing of the Ministry of Education and Provincial Education Departments.
Comments
Comments are closed.