World Environmental Education Day is celebrated on 26 January. Its main goal is to identify environmental issues both globally and locally and to raise awareness about the need for participation in order to conserve and protect the environment.
International Environmental Education Day has been celebrated every 26 January since 1975. That year, the International Workshop on Environmental Education was organised in Belgrade and attended by experts from more than 70 countries, where the Belgrade Charter was published.
The DECR would like to take advantage of World Environmental Education Day as an opportunity to promote knowledge about some of the most serious environmental problems facing our planet and the various strategies that can help us tackle them. To do this resources have been shared to the DECR Outreach and Education Facebook page, and we encourage students, teachers, parents and the community at large to take this opportunity to learn about critical environmental concepts, issues and concerns.
The Belgrade Charter embodies the fundamental demands of environmental education, the goals of which are as follows: To develop a world population that is aware of, and concerned about, the environment and its associated problems, and which has the knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivations and commitment to work individually and collectively towards solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones.
It is important to understand the causes and effects of climate change especially as it affects the TCI, realise that sustainable development is the best possible way to meet the community's current needs without compromising the capacity of future generations and take stock of the fact that protecting the environment means ensuring our own survival. It is also vital that we understand what renewable energies are and how they can help us take care of our planet, and that water is a natural, limited and scarce resource that is essential to life on Earth.