Based on its social responsibility to consolidate and promote voluntary environmental work and spread correct environmental knowledge among all segments of society, especially young people, the Friends of the Environment team of the Kuwait Environment Protection Society participated in the event celebrating World Children’s Day, which was organized by Yarmouk Health City as an open day that included many activities in the health, environmental, psychological, social and other fields.
In this regard, Engineer Maali Al-Aqab, Public Relations Officer at the Environment Society, said, “The youth stage falls within the Society’s interests through the launch of specialized programs and projects through the program plan of its Friends of the Environment team, which includes ages 8-18 years. Therefore, the Society saw the participation in the celebration of World Children’s Day with many activities as being of interest to this age group.” She added, “The participation of the young members of the team included a multi-activity pavilion, including an awareness aspect with the Society’s specialized publications to support their knowledge and cultural aspect, as well as presenting a group of activities of the Friends of the Environment team, in addition to providing many electronic links to invite people to join the team, the membership registration form, the Environment magazine, and a link to the documentary series documenting wildlife in the State of Kuwait, in which team members participate in some of the episodes.”.
Engineer Al-Aqab explained that the agenda for the participation of the “Friends of the Environment Team,” which was administratively supervised by Anwar Al-Muharib, a member of the society, also included a segment for environmental art projects for children aged 4 and up, distributing environmentally friendly garbage bags to other pavilions and urging them to clean the site, in addition to organizing a workshop on planting plant seeds in plastic bottles from waste using cotton and water, and making an art piece from furniture boxes and decorating it with simple materials from nature, in addition to organizing a “compost” workshop, which is a workshop on making organic fertilizer from the process of recycling food scraps, paper and soil until it becomes soil suitable for planting, and collecting and sorting plastic and paper waste in separate boxes, praising “the Yarmouk Health District for the good organization and providing activity stations and environmentally friendly seats for use from recycled materials or reused for other purposes, which encourages reducing waste.”.
She stated that “the team consists of young Kuwaiti men and women, under the age of eighteen, from school students, and the society is keen to ensure the comprehensiveness of their training through their participation in local and international environmental conferences and exhibitions. The society instills in them the value of environmental citizenship, and they have been trained and prepared to engage in voluntary environmental work. They are the nucleus of national cadres and elites in the society’s specialized teams and committees. Their field and training plan is based on assigning them many organizational and supervisory roles and carrying out support work.”.
She noted that “the Environmental Society works to promote the value of environmental citizenship among team members through the behavior adopted by the individual to protect the environment and its natural resources and preserve them from pollution. This reflects knowledge and awareness of the scarcity of natural resources at times, and the limited ability of them to regenerate or rehabilitate and rebuild themselves at other times, and the importance of preserving and developing them sustainably. In addition, it seeks to establish many principles, including rationalizing the use of non-renewable natural resources, not exceeding the ability of renewable natural resources to rebuild themselves, and actively participating in environmental awareness, monitoring, and environmental decision-making processes, as well as striving to raise the level of awareness of environmental issues and their repercussions at the individual and collective levels.”.
