Elementary School Students Attend the World's First Environmental Summit for Children
Nearly 90% of Attendees Believe It Is Everyone's Responsibility to Fight Against Air Pollution And Protect the Environment
TAIPEI, Oct. 3, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Far EasTone Telecommunications (FET) has been a long-term supporter of environmental issues. The concept of "Eco-fashion, Creative responsibility" defines our two main CSR themes. FET has been sparing no efforts in devoting corporate resources to promote the environmental concepts in a more creative way to help the general public to act in an environmental friendly manner in their daily lives. Today, FET gathered nearly 300 elementary school children from northern, central and southern part of Taiwan to put on their creative "gas masks" and attend the first Environmental Summit for Children in the world. During the summit, the attendees had proposed ten action plans to help reduce air pollution and improve air quality, including taking mass transportation vehicles, reducing the usage of plastic bags and increasing green areas.
Yvonne Li, President of FET noted that, "According to the 2015 National Wellbeing Indicators published by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics of Executive Yuan, the indicator of air pollution signals a red light, which means that deteriorating air quality has become one of the most imminent issues that Taiwan has to tackle with. Words are not enough to preserve the natural environment for our future generations. As long as we start from ourselves and implement the action plans proposed by the children, we will be able to create the ripple effect and maximize our influence on improving the air quality."
Results of the first "Survey on Air Pollution Awareness and Mobile Generation"[1], were also published during the summit. The results show the generation gap in terms of the understanding, attitude and behavior towards air pollution issues. The survey also used the acronym of "AIR OK" to summarize the five major characteristics of children in facing air pollution issues, which are: Active, Initiative, Responsible, Optimistic and Knowledgeable.
In the area of "Knowledgeable", children know better than adults when it comes to the questions like: What does PM2.5 mean? How many colors of air qualify flags are there? and What color of flag represents the worst air quality? In the survey, 55.6% of children believe that air quality could be effectively improved within the next five years while 50.3% of adults think it could take more than ten years or even longer, which shows that the children are more "Optimistic" on air pollution issues than adults.
Children also take more "Initiatives" to curb air pollution. On average, they take 4.8 actions every week to improve environmental quality, such as using mass transportation vehicle, greening the environment, bringing their own shopping bags or reading air pollution-related information from newspapers and magazines while adults only take 3.2 actions per week. When asked whether they agree to the statement that "If everyone can actively involve in the initiative, I believe the air quality could be improved within a year," 30.8% of children strongly agreed while only 10.4% of adults strongly agreed, which shows that children are more "Active" than adults on environmental issues. In the area of "Responsible", nearly 90% of children believe that reducing air pollution is everyone's responsibility while 82.8% of adults also believe so.
Professor Wang Jin-Ming of the Graduate Institute of Environmental Education at National Taiwan Normal University and the Chairman of Chinese Ecological Information and Environmental Education Association noted that, "The survey shows that elementary school students have a high awareness of air pollution issues. Compared with adults, children are more knowledgeable, more active and more willing to take initiatives to improve the environmental quality. We believe the environmental education in Taiwan could be more effective if we help the children to acquire the environmental knowledge at an early age."
FET especially invited famous director Yang Ya-Che to produce three short documentary films to show how children living in Taipei, Changhwa and Kaohsiung observed the air quality in their neighborhood. Children in Kaohsiung were forced to stay in the classroom for their PE class due to inferior air quality while Children in Changhwa worried that grandma's watermelon fields couldn't bear fruit because of air pollution and the children in Taipei had to visit the clinic frequently due to allergies. In the documentary films, these children used their imagination by giving "super powers" to their hand-made gas mask to protect against air pollution. The three films had accumulated more than 3.40 million views on Youtube in less than a month. Photos of all the creative gas masks made by children can also be viewed or shared from our event website (http://event3.fetnet.net/CSR/). The Friday APP website of FET also features a variety of air quality monitoring apps to help users get the real-time air quality information. Furthermore, FET also invited Ifkids Theatre to produce animations adapted from the winning digital picture books in the annual Green Kung Fu campaign. These animations have been put on Vod.fetnet.net for members and NPO/NGO groups to view for free in order to promote environmental education in an entertaining way.
FET has been actively engaged in promoting environmental education and showing our love for Taiwan. With the ten action plans and the creative gas masks made by children, the campaign of "Cherish the Earth and Spread the Love" truly demonstrated our commitment to paying it forward. In the future, FET will continue to devote more corporate resources to raising the awareness of environmental education and fulfilling our brand's commitment of "Closing the Distance".
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The survey is conducted by Pollster online survey platform from September 22 to 25, 2015 on behalf of FET and is directed by Chinese Ecological Information and Environmental Education Association. The survey includes face-to-face interview, which was conducted in the form of questionnaires to third to sixth grade students in four cities of Taiwan (Taipei City, New Taipei City, Hsinchu City and Taichung City), and online survey, which was targeted at online population aged 20 and above. The total sample size is 2,174 with 1,087 valid responses from each category. The margin of error is ±2.10% under a 95% confidence level. |
Media Contact
Ogilvy Public Relations
Rina Liang, [email protected]
Hiffer Wang, [email protected]
Han Lin, [email protected]
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151003/273679
SOURCE Far EasTone Telecommunications (FET)
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