Active Learning and Disaster Risk Reduction

The author provides a robust discussion of an ethnographic case study to facilitate creative thinking about how to use communications and social media technology to build resilience and improve citizen disaster preparedness through a “Be Ready” trivia campaign. This research can inform strategies to achieve several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction's Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR). Future research directions include a new community resilience index that measures citizens' use of communications and social media technology. Implications for social change include raising the level of public awareness and facilitating a means to improve personal responsibility for disaster preparedness through low cost education programs. This could improve efforts by government and non-government organizations to improve disaster risk reduction; increase access to information and communication technology; increase disaster emergency planning and response; and build resilient communities.

Building Sustainability Through Environmental Education

Education is an important informative tool used to maintain the prevailing values of a society. It is the best thing anyone can acquire; it is an asset, an act of attaining knowledge, developing sense of analyzing and perception in preparing oneself. Quality education is one of the 17 Global Goals that make up the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. There are three types of education, namely formal, non-formal, and informal education. Vulnerable young people are often excluded from educational systems. Inclusive polices are needed to ensure access to education for poorest youth in cities and remote areas, youth affected with HIV, refugee youth, and migrant youth. This chapter explores education and sustainable development.

Revisiting Zanzibari Seaweed

Well before island nations began to consider rising ocean levels, a feature of global climate change, they have been concerned with the allocation of water resources. The purpose of this chapter is to revisit the efforts of Zanzibar's academic, as well as private and public institutions, as they promote environmentally responsible entrepreneurial projects, while advancing women's economic empowerment. Analysis will examine the history of seaweed production and consider how Zanzibar's seaweed farmers have recently responded to the dislocations associated with global climate change. This discussion will also consider to what extent Zanzibari seaweed production reflects the norms enshrined in the United Nation's Rio + 20 platform, and the language of the UN's 2030 sustainable development goals.

Nature-Based Solutions for Water Security and the Role of Education for Enhancing the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda

Water security is a central sustainable development challenge. Billions of people lack access to clean and reliable water, while global hydrological changes and increasingly common extreme weather events pose serious risks. However, current issues are mainly driven by unsustainable management and ensuing ecological degradation. Nature-based solutions restore, enhance and safeguard ecosystems that provide water for people and the rest of nature. They also buffer the impacts of natural hazards and provide other critical benefits. Global policy frameworks on sustainable development, disaster prevention, climate change, biodiversity, wetlands and desertification offer holistic objectives toward water security. Education and capacity development is one of their central connective tissues, and as a mean to enhance their implementation. In spite of this, major gaps remain that require novel approaches. This chapter explores these and discusses strategic considerations and innovative approaches that can leverage existing knowledge and foster context specific innovation for transformative solutions.

When Good Waters Go Bad

This chapter offers commentary on adaptation and resilience to stresses on water systems in a potentially catastrophic future. While considering futures studies as an integral part of science education is not new, reorganizing knowledge and its deployment to equip future leaders to address the complexity, paradox and unpredictability of problem requires new educational paradigms. Youth are poised as agents of change in a collaborative, networked, and complexity-embracing future. Through exploring the changes in waters due to climate change and human activity, and what those changes may mean for developing and maintaining resilience in the postnormal future, a complex adaptive systems (CAS) framework guides new alternatives for education and water policy action in these changing times and within the broad goals of sustainability.

Building Community Resilience Through Environmental Education

The call for collaborative efforts to respond to climate change is heeded through bilateral and multilateral agreements. The UN Sustainable Development Goals bears testimony to the call. Environmental education is one of the vehicles to raise awareness, understanding, and assessment of sustainable development goals at a community level to build resilience for sustainability. Environmental education enhances the accomplishment of the key competencies for sustainability. Climate change is a complex environmental problem that is not only naturally induced, but made more stressful by anthropocentric capabilities in the quest for a better lifestyle. Although climate change causes and impacts are known, its mitigation strategies are compounded by human wants at the expense of their own sustainable survival. This chapter explores ways of building sustainable development in communities. Environmental education is a core development strategy in local communities against the adverse impact of climate change, especially in vulnerable areas.

Addressing the Sustainable Development Goals Through Environmental Education

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 Quality Education has increased awareness in pre-university environmental education efforts. Environmental education is important to not only creating awareness of world environmental issues, but taking action towards fostering positive change. Environmental education programs such as SeaTrust Institute's AWARE (Action Within a Resilient Environment) assist teens in learning about issues that directly impact their communities and their world. AWARE combines environmental education with hands-on experiential learning projects that help promote environmental awareness in their communities. Through education and experience with active scholars and professional practitioners, students gain an increased understanding of environmental challenges and ways to make a positive impact – both domestically and globally. This is especially critical to developing countries which lack the educational programs and resources to address the impact environmental changes have on their nations and communities.

Conferences as Learning Spaces for Advancing Knowledge and Action for the SDGs

The international community is increasingly recognizing the importance of youth as key stakeholders in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030. Young people need to be continuously empowered and provided with opportunities to enhance their competences and networks. There are multiple capacity-building and networking events that seek to engage youth, yet the learning and impact generated in such spaces remains less understood. This chapter explores the value of youth-targeted and youth-led conferences and events centered on sustainability themes in advancing the learning experiences of youth participants. Testimonials from young people provide key insights into their engagement. The findings highlight the need for such platforms to be more empowering through focusing more directly on fostering collaborative actions amongst youth and organizations rather than merely on capacity-building on the spot; and through garnering financial or technical support for advancing youth action on the SDGs, especially at the local community level.

Resilience and Sustainability Development

Informed action by the leaders of the future is critical for creating resilient communities. Preparing these future leaders through formal and informal education, research, and environmental/climate change programs that interweave local knowledge with the most current global science positions them to becomes the catalysts that propel community leaders to engage a wider range of possible futures. This chapter integrates findings from a SeaTrust Institute research project with the sustainable development goals in an analysis supporting dynamic and reconfigurable combinations of agents that promote the attributes of elasticity, future orientation, and motivation to address the high stakes choices for resilience to climate and environmental/social change. Author objectives in this chapter are to illustrate the optimum roles of youth in the process and what preparations and conditions are needed to instill and support youth in their ability to flip a process at the point of catastrophe to restore equilibrium and promote resilience.

When Things Fall Apart

The chapter addresses the challenges facing first responders and public administrators due to accelerated warming, global weirding, and the limits to complexity. Similarly, these same challenges are also likely to have an impact on the ability of governments, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations to implement and realize the sustainable development goals and their 169 targets. The chapter focuses on the state of critical infrastructure, primarily in the USA, and the maintenance and sustainability of the physical systems of energy distribution, transportation, communication, and other basic services that support economic development and social systems. The chapter posits the need to explore these themes through the lens of futures studies and the need to envision and create preferred futures.