Students and teachers feted after participating in the first phase of the initiative.
Doha: The Arab Youth Climate Movement Qatar has recently concluded the first phase of its ongoing ‘Household Carbon Footprint Initiative.’ The organisation held a ceremony to celebrate the participating schools to mark the conclusion. The survey aims to understand Qatar’s resource consumption and carbon footprint. Around 650 teachers were trained to support students carrying out the survey.
Carbon footprint means the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere due to the activities of a particular individual, organisation, or community.
Speaking to The Peninsula, Neeshad Shafi, Executive Director, AYCMQ, said that though the survey didn’t reach its targeted reach of households for data collection, it has a good number to proceed with its findings. During the initiative’s launch last year, AYCMQ disclosed that the survey would be accomplished in three phases, including information gathering, targeting 1,800-2,000 households and several schools across Qatar.
“We completed our first phase where we ran the programme with participating students,” Shafi said.
“We have a good number of applications to proceed with some comprehensive outcomes and basis on the survey results that we have. So we will be working to reach more schools after the World Cup to have more complete data. We targeted more than 1,000 households and 1,000 data but didn’t reach that mark. So we are now reaching out to the teachers we trained to push for students to complete the survey.”
According to Sayeed Mohammed, Director of Policy and Research at AYCMQA, the initiative’s second phase would be more comprehensive as it would reach out to the community in Qatar and the rest of the schools that couldn’t take part in the first phase.
“So the idea of the next phase is we are going public. We are asking everybody in Qatar to participate in this survey-based analysis to measure their carbon footprint. Now it’s not only exclusive to schools. Community members in Qatar can participate, and we will roll out new campaign videos soon. At the same time, we will be pushing for more private sector schools, which are English-speaking schools, to join the campaign,” he said.
The AYCMQ has partnered with critical national stakeholders for the initiative, including the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MoEHE), Supreme Committee of Delivery and Legacy and Unesco. The initiative is also supported by the US Embassy Qatar grant funding.
