268 Results Are Tagged With "Environment and Sustainability"

Conservar el medio ambiente a travez de la reforestacion de bosques

T5 (Teacher trainers team) is a national non-governmental organization established on 16th June 2003 in Bissau by a group of trainers. And it was legalized in September 2005 and published in the Official Bulletin No. 38/2005. Since 2003 the organization is devoted to actions aiming to empower beneficiaries through education. Considering de constant instability, high poverty rate and the country challenges to tackle gender disparity and violence, poor water management, hygiene and sanitation and preventive health care issues, T5 NGO has decided to use the potential of its outreach to invest on programs led by community based teams systematically assisted by experienced professionals. Program development approach Through the present project, T5 intend to carry out actions at the target zone involving its key collaborators (teacher, student and administrative body) on development of a project aiming to stimulate communities? pro-activeness on eradication of poor practice on water management, sanitation and hygiene and preventive health care.

https://alumni.state.gov/node/add/aeif-project Project profile Tourist Conservation Awareness - Raising Tourist Eco-Awareness by Web Documentaries What is the challenge or need your project will address and what innovative methods will you employ? *Describe the specific need or challenge that your team will address with this project. (3-5 sentences) 600 Icelandic ecosystems are fragile and particularly sensitive to anthropogenic impacts. Tourism has multiplied and is now nearing 1 million tourists a year. Our challenge is to preserve the natural capital of Iceland, maintain viable wildlife resources and preserve Iceland?s unique ecosystems which are under increasing pressures by tourism and by global climatic change. There is a need to modify tourist consumer and activity behavior to preserve the ecosystems of Iceland. Similar challenges can be found in other areas of the World where ecosystems and biodiversity are being threatened. What is your innovative solution or approach? Briefly describe the specific solution or approach to address the need or challenge and explain why it is innovative. (3-5 sentences) (include quantitative information where possible) 600 We will mobilize the alumni network to produce and distribute series of short web documentaries aimed at educating tourists about how their choices affect the nature of Iceland. Each documentary will be targeted to raise awareness on a particular environmental threat the tourism industry poses on Icelandic ecosystems and biodiversity. We will use social media and tourism websites to air short videos encouraging visitors to engage in eco-friendly tourism, avoid damaging fragile ecosystems, and consume ethically-selected food sources. *How will the project impact your community? What changes (in people, institutions, attitudes, practices) do you think you will see? 1000 More than 80% of tourists visit Iceland because of its natural beauty, and wish to engage in exploring the country?s natural ecosystems. The most intensively visited sites are those that are the most fragile ones, nature reserves and natural monuments. Consuming exotic foods is considered by many tourists to be an integral part of the ultimate experience of the trip to a foreign country. One of the factors behind the world-wide decline in biodiversity is the demand of consuming rare or unusual foods by tourists. Anticipated results from environmentally ethical choices in consumption include the recovery of wildlife populations that are harvested commercially for restaurants. The enlightened tourist will affect local policy towards more effective conservation efforts. By changing visitor behavior we will move toward a sustainable tourism industry. The overall project impact is conserving the natural ecosystems of Iceland for the longer term. Who will be involved? *Beneficiaries: Describe who your target groups (or communities) are. How many people will directly benefit from your project? 1000 Tourists traveling to Iceland are our main target group. Number of tourists travelling to Iceland is fast approaching 1 million per year. The project will benefit all tourists travelling to Iceland for the long term, especially those 80% that travel to the country with visiting its nature in mind. Our secondary target groups are travel agencies and service providers for tourists, who will respond to the pressure from the enlightened tourist and offer more sustainable services for the longer term. By knowing how to behave in order to minimize environmental footprint, tourists will enable park managers and environmental professionals to be more effective in preserving Iceland?s nature. All Icelanders now and hopefully future generations will benefit from having maintained the biodiversity and natural ecosystems of Iceland. We propose that our approach will benefit and be transferrable to other regions in the World, and be one of the solutions for preserving life on Earth. LOCAL PARTNERS *Local partners: Please list your project partners and explain their specific responsibilities. Please note if you have an existing relationship with the partner organization(s) and how they are committed to working on this project. If not, how do you anticipate establishing a partnership with the organization(s)? 1750 Most of the popular nature reserves and natural monuments receive so many visitations and are under so much environmental footprint from the tourism industry, that the Icelandic Environmental Agency (IEA) has listed them as red (in imminent danger of losing its conservation value) or orange. The annual number of tourists exceeds the triple population of Iceland per year, which makes management of the industry more difficult to handle by the Icelandic authorities. The natural parks do not have funding to operate towards sustainable tourism, which leads us to the conclusion that we need to affect the behavior of the tourists themselves on the environmental footprint they make while visiting Iceland. The local partners have a wide range of experience from forming environmental policy, management, managing environmental NGOs, planning other fields related to the project itself. The project has established close partnership with the two major environmental NGOs in Iceland, Landvernd and the Icelandic Nature Conservancy, both of which will contribute to making the documentaries themselves and in their distribution. Dr. Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir, a Fulbright alumna has a wide experience in the environmental field, most recently working for the IEA. The team of partners includes furthermore professionals from the Reykjavik Academy and the Agricultural University of Iceland. The board of the Icelandic Fulbright Alumni Association form the steering group of the project.Fulbright Association of Iceland will handle the finance and accounting of the project. SagaFest, a NGO established to promote sustainability, art and storytelling will participate in implementation and distribution of the project. *Alumni Team Describe the roles and responsibilities that individual members of the alumni team will play in implementing this project. 900 The project participants consist mostly of Fulbright Alumni in Iceland. Both major participating NGOs are managed by Fulbright alumni and have an integral responsibility in the dissemination of the project. Other participants are staff or other members of organizations run by Fulbright alumni. The chair of the Saga-Fest NGO will be a member of the Fulbright Alumni before the onset of the project. As a whole the project management is in the hands of board members of the Icelandic Fulbright Alumni Association, and will draw upon the experience and make use of the network of the whole community of Fulbright Alumni in Iceland. STEPS TO IMPLEMENT How and when will you implement your project? *Implementation Plan and Timeline: How will you actually make this happen? Outline the proposed steps for implementation, including the timeframe for each major activity. List proposed dates (month, quarter, etc.) for each major activity. Please Include quantitative information about participants and activities. Include the specific responsibilities of the alumni team. 2250 1. Start of project July 15th 2015. 2. A preliminary report maps the most urgent messages to present by documentaries, such as assessing which commercially available wildlife in Icelandic restaurants are from non-sustainable wildlife resources, and based on the most urgent needs for lowering environmental footprint by tourists as evaluated by the scientific group of the project and the needs of the Icelandic Environmental Agency. 3. A preliminary report on how much wildlife is consumed and how many restaurants in Reykjavik offer items on their menu that include wildlife species in decline and not sustainably harvested (such as many seabird species), or offer wildlife sources from species that are protected by international laws (such as whale species). 4. Completed script of the documentaries for each topic: food choices, how to behave in the landscape, how to engage in activities that educate about the environment. 5. Filming and processing (some material may have to be purchased). 6. Distribution of documentary and media outreach. 7. Outreach to international alumni associations through the State Alumni website. 8. A final report on measured success of the project made available to the State Alumni website. 9. End of project June 30th 2016. Total Funding Requested: $25,000.00 *Communication Plan: How will you promote your project? Please include social media, print news, or other forms of media you intend to use to share information about your project to 1) ben eficiaries and 2) the public. 1750 The documentaries will be distributed widely on social media, websites of travel agencies, websites of regional tourism boards, and via travel writers in local media. The format of the documentaries will be such that it is easily downloadable. The documentaries will be hooked into search engines in an effective way to maximize their exposure. Airlines which fly to Iceland will be encouraged to show the documentary on their media sites. The premier will be offered to RUV the Icelandic public television station. Tour companies selling trips to Iceland will be asked to link the documentary to their websites. The State Alumni Website will be used both to introduce the project and to reach out to other countries to form an international alumni network of using documentaries targeted to decrease visitor impact on biodiversity. Outreach to other alumni organizations introducing our project will have wider spread impact on global biodiversity. *Evaluation: How will you evaluate success or impact of the project? Explain any tools or methods you might utilize to measure results. (i.e. surveys, interviews, focus groups, meetings, analytics, metrics, etc.) 1500 We will evaluate the success and impact of our project be the following: 1. Tourist agency bookings of ecotourism-related activities 2. Number of restaurants that stop offering unsustainably or unethically harvested wildlife. 3. Less total consumption of unsustainably or unethically harvested wildlife 4. Number of views, likes, retweets and other signs of engagement on social media. 5. Spread ? how many websites link to the documentaries. 6. Number of news articles and media outreach about the documentaries. 7. Number of international alumni associations reached to form a network of Raising Biodiversity Awareness documentaries. Special emphasis will be made to introduce alumni from African and South-East Asian countries, but in these areas there is a tremendous pressure on biodiversity from tourism, which increases the rate of global biodiversity loss and threatens indigenous communities in these regions. *Sustainability: How do you plan to continue this project and ensure its sustainability beyond this initial funding year? 1250 One or both of the environmental NGOs, Landvernd and the Icelandic Nature Conservancy will host links to the documentaries for the long term and thus ensure the sustainability of the project beyond its initial funding year and for the long term. The documentaries will be permanently downloadable on the web, affecting change in tourist behavior beyond the funding year. The project has a potential to benefit both Icelanders and Icelandic ecosystem for the long term, from enjoying a vibrant tourism industry without losing natural capital. Foreign tourists learn about the environment of the country they are visiting. Iceland?s ecosystems and future generations benefit when travelers learn about environmental ethics and how to minimize the negative impacts of one?s travels. Travel industry (~25% of Iceland?s export earnings) benefits from having a more sustainable business model and from having tourists who are motivated to engage in ecotourism. We believe that these benefits add up to make the project viable for a longer future, monitoring the needs for environmental issues rising in Iceland and getting the message out to the wider public involving everyone and making everyone responsible for sustainable environmental management. Fro

Based on the country poverty reduction strategy paper (DENARPII, 2011) for achieving the MDGs in this field it would be important to increase the proportion of sexually active people who know their HIV status 2-6% in 2015, and for T5 it is critical that all citizens improve their behavior and attitude regarding the preventive care. Considering that in terms of sexual behavior, the MICS-4 / IDS-2010 shows that 80% of reached young women aged 15-24 have already had sexual intercourse and 39% of these young people also had sex with casual partners during the 12 months preceding the survey. Of these groups, 47% reported having used a condom at last intercourse, and the other portion doesn?t often due to refusal of their partner. The prevalence of HIV / AIDS is estimated at 5.8% in 2009, according to the sentries operations. MICS (2010) almost all women in Guinea-Bissau have heard of AIDS (93% among those who are 15-24 and 91% aged 15-49. But only 15% of young women (15-24 years) have depth knowledge about HIV prevention. And among them, only 43% correctly identify all three means of transmission from mother to child. Regarding the attitudes of acceptance of people with the virus HIV, only 8% of young women expressed positive an attitude of acceptance. According to the National Program for the Fight against Tuberculosis (PNLT), the incidence of tuberculosis in 2005 was 206 per 100,000 persons / year (WHO, nd) and 19% of new cases in adults were HIV positive (WHO, nd) and the prevalence in the same year was 293 cases per 100,000 population (WHO, nd). The evolution of this disease is closely linked to HIV infection / AIDS. Malaria continues to be an endemic stable disease with a high prevalence and transmission. The groups most vulnerable to malaria are children under five years of age and pregnant women. The WHO (2013) reported a worrying number of cases above 20/1000. From Voice of America (VoA, 2014) it is stated that from the 2012 report, not published yet, it was registered 129.684 cases of malaria in last year, 370 died, and among this malaria-related death 164 were children under 5 age representing 44% of malaria mortal victims. From 80s to 2014 cholera have being killing many people in Guinea Bissau and in 2014 the sub-region West Africa has known a new pandemic (Ebola) affecting more than 3.000 peoples and threating many lives. Base on the above analysis, T5 as a development agent intervening in the affected sub-region, particularly in Guinea Bissau, is joining global synergy on stopping HIV/AID, Tuberculosis, Malaria, Cholera and Ebola destruction through communication for behavior change mainly on hygiene, sanitation, reproductive health, family planning, women's health and gender roles.