By Bertrand Dushimumuremyi
Conservation of our environment is an issue that we must constantly think of all the time; whether young or old, this is crucial for all us. Today, climate change that is arising from environmental degradation has become one of the most powerful problems that the world faces. Conservation being a crucial issue, we have to understand that if it’s ignored by the dominant population of the world, achieving our goal will be difficult.
Conserving our environment simply refers to protecting it from harm while using it sparingly and technology, the application of technical knowledge, is a good tool the youth can exploit to keep our environment safe.
To this day, youth is the age group that holds most of the world’s population taking almost 42% of it; this holds the same in our country, Rwanda where it holds almost 40% of the total population. For this reason, we understand that if the youth take part in environment conservation, they would make an outstanding contribution than any other age group.
As research shows, youth are the age group which highly uses technological appliances and the internet. Many of them spend their free time on the social medias like Facebook and Instagram, and others are on televisions and laptops watching videos and streaming music of different kinds on YouTube and Netflix. It’s estimated that the average youth spends a total of 3 hours on such technological appliances and social media, and the extreme can spend up to 10 hours.
But I would ask, are the youth making profit out of the technology that they are spending most of their time on? If the time they spend on social media and technological appliances doing unnecessary and time-consuming things is spent in productive issues, many of the problems our world has today can be solved.
On 4th of February 2004, while in his room, a 20 years old youth Mark Zuckerberg exploited the technology and developed a communication software (Facebook) that solved one of the main problems the world hard at that time; difficulties in communication. Through his exploitation of technology, he has made communication easy.
Similarly, the young ladies and gentlemen can use technology and solve one of the heaviest problems we have today, climate change. With Technology, we can conserve our environment and thus solve the problem regarding climate change.
Here I list a few of the many ways in which the youth can use technology as tool for conserving the environment.
Environmental Real Time Status Apps; awareness about environment issues is greatly hindered to many people because they are not able to receive the necessary updates regarding changes and hazards taking place due to our poor use of the environment. With this much time the youth spend on technological appliances, they can build software that will provide necessary information to different people about environment conservation.
Awareness through social media: according to the report from brand watch on 1st June 2019, about 350 M posts per day are made on Facebook. Knowing that the youth are the most users of social media, this tells us that the youth are the ones who make many of these posts. How productive would it be if only half of the youth on social media took the initiative to make one post calling people for environment conservation per day...More than 10M posts for environment protection would be made! This would be very effective in conserving our environment than many of the methods used today. Social media can facilitate much in environment conservation if used properly; in this 21st century, many people won’t spend a day without visiting social media and this is why it would be very effective to take advantage of making posts and writing daily on environment conservation.
New environmentally friendly energy production methods can be developed by the youth through technology: air pollution from use of non-renewable energy resources has to be suppressed if we need to conserve our environment. In long period of time the youth spend at school, they can profit out the different technology resources present there such as internet connection, laboratories and research rooms to develop and improve the environmentally friendly renewable energy resources like wind energy, solar energy and others. This will facilitate in minimizing the consumption of non- renewable energy resources which complement to pollution of the environment.
Space provision: As the world population continues to increase, the land becomes smaller and thus our natural environment is being destroyed to provide more land. This is the reason to as why techniques like vertical farming must be implemented so that land which has been being used for farming can be left for people to settle, thus our natural environment won’t be destroyed any more.
As the most populated age group of the world, if the youth make use of the technological appliances where they spend most of their time, combining actions and strategies of awareness, the youth will play a big role in environment conservation. The youth need to recognize this role upon them and the available resource of technology they have got but are not exploiting, if the world is to achieve the environment conservation we need.