Alicante awaits us...

Here in Morocco is sooo cold, I want to arrive home in Alicante next week (after a stop in LTC Madrid - Nightmare before Christmas III) and start preparing our traditional NY meeting. This time I will be the host, and it is a pleasure and honour after having been so well treated in Estonia and Greece.

I am really looking forward to meet again all those friends, some of them will be together for 4th year in a row, what a record! For some others will be the first, a nice comeback after a year of absence, and unfortunately some people won't be able to join us this year :( We will have you present in our hearts, that is for sure, because we are the Panda team!

Kadri is working on the program, because we will be there for work; but I will try to prepare the social agenda, with NY party, and hopefully we can squeeze there some outdoor activity as usual (what about climbing the mountain in the picture?). Yes! the sea is there so we will be able to swim again like past year. For those of you who are cold-blooded, there will be also sauna :)

Countdown already started, there are just 12 days till first of you come to Alicante...

How to define "sustainable development"?

I'm sure most people have heard this term somewhere. Another thing is to actually understand what is meant with it, and moreover how to achieve it and why we would even want it?
The most known and sort of "official" definition says it's "development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the abiliy of future generations to meet their needs". Lot's of broad words, isn't it?
In the survey made in autumn among AEGEE members, we asked the people to define it in their own words. And here's what came out.
Almost half of the answers mentioned that sustainable development is something keeping in mind the future generations, around 1/3 mentioned that it's mainly to protect and safeguard the environment. The 2 other sustainable development pillars (the concept consists of 3 pillars: environment, economy and society) were mentioned less: around 20% put the focus on economical development, and 15% to social welfare.
"Managing the resources" was also the keywords mentioned quite often, whether they were meant as natural resources or some other resources. As activity, desides using the word "development", respondents mentioned "efficient" or "rational resource use", "improvement of life quality" and few times also "technology". What could be also brought out is that the need to sutain our planet, world was mentioned more times than the needs and benefits to human race.
Of course there are always some more creative ways to define "sustainable development" like: "living without messing up the world too much" :)

What can be concluded based on this question? That in general, young people do have some overview what this concept means, the need to preserve our world for future generations and environmental protection as key activity seem to be the most important parts of it.

For those, wanting to read more about sustainable development definitions, click here. Also, a sort of speculation of the "official" definition can be found here.
Give your thoughts: how do you see sustainable development? Is it actually something we should strive for? How far can we actually develop?

The (biggest) environmental problem in Europe?

This was the question asked to AEGEE members in autumn 2008, during a survey about the ecological awareness of young Europeans. Now the time has come to start analysing the responses. And here I would like to list the problems that AEGEE'ans consider the most important ones in Europe nowadays.
Out of 145 respondents, there were over 40 different problems mentioned. That shows that indeed we have a lot of things to take care of. Compiling them into topics, here you can see the Top 10:

1) air pollution and greenhouse gases
2) unsustainable production and use of energy, fossil fuels
3) water problems (pollution, shortage of drinking water)
4) unsustainable transport, too many cars
5) waste problems and lack of recycling
6) over consumption and production, using too much resources
7) global warming and climate change
8) pollution generally
9) deforestration, unsustainable use of forests
10) lack of political will and international cooperation to make changes

Other problems mentioned were: nuclear pollution, people's awareness and attitude, problems connected to industries, agricultural production, consuming too much meat and fish, increasing poverty, pollution from cities, etc.

There was no big domination of one opinion (the no 1 problem was mentioned by around 12% of respondents), but it can be seen that many of the listed problems are more or less connected to climate change. This reminds me the poll made by EU in September 2008 showing also that Europeans worry a lot about climate change, BUT most of them are not willing to do much about it. What about us, the youth, AEGEE?

About the survey: The whole survey consisted of questions generally about sustainable development and about consumption patterns. It will be basis for a Master thesis and the overall final results will be published in summer 2009.