Boston Earth Summit Calls for Action

On April 24th , 2021, World Earth Day, we announced the launch of the Boston Earth Summit!

Boston Earth Summit, led by our Assistant Academic Principal Mr. David Bremner, includes members from Grade 3 to Grade 11 students. Their mission is to lead Boston International School to finding ways we can help as a school and in our own homes to reduce our impact on climate change, and to protect ourselves against the effects of climate change that have already begun.

The first meeting of Boston Earth Summit 

The volunteers of Boston Earth Summit held their first meeting on April 27th. The students from different grades made their time from the busy study schedule to devote into the environmental protection cause.

On the first meeting, they looked at data that the school has collected for the last few months about the food waste, water usage, and electricity usage. The students observed the data carefully and their first focus was food waste. They exchanged their ideas and raised a lot of practical measures that could help reduce the food waste. All the ideas will be discussed and trialed over when the summit meet again to identify what should be next.

Being part of the Boston Earth Summit is a great way to take action about what has been learned. It is a powerful chapter to a student’s learning story. It is a wonderful opportunity to show leadership and make change.

 

Why did we start the Boston Earth Summit? 

As an international school, Boston International School aims at nurturing global citizens with international mindedness. As one of the results, we have support the United Nations Global Goals.

Our planet’s health is vital to our own health. Just like we inquire into topics each day at school, so humans have inquired into the health of our planet.

First, we were curious about small changes we noticed in the world around us. We noticed that animal numbers and types were getting lower, our forests were getting smaller, our seasons were changing differently.

Next, we found out more about it by doing experiments, keeping records, exploring possibilities. We sampled the air around us, we tracked animal migrations, we drilled ice caps, and measured soil quality.

Then, we started to make connections between what we were seeing. We saw the average temperatures rising related to the ice caps reducing in size, the seasons coming earlier, the tropical storms becoming fiercer.

After that, we discovered the problem was much bigger than we thought – the enormous plastic gyres that float around our oceans, the reduction of insects that can pollinate our plants that grow our food, the increase in air pollutants in the areas around our cities.

Now, that we know all this, what do we do about it? Now, it is time to act. Action is happening at the highest levels – world governments have agreed to combat the effects of climate change around the world. Action is also happening at local levels, and that means us.  We welcome more attention on the actions from the BIS community.