Editors’ forward for HSSE’s special issue on sustainability
This special edition of HSSE Online places the spotlight on the overarching themes of sustainability, sustainable development and sustainability-related pedagogies. The eight articles in this edition run along two key strands, with the first one attending to the (un)sustainable use of resources. Ayshathun Munavvara expounds on the the over-extraction of groundwater for irrigation purposes near Tonle Sap (a lake in Cambodia), while Jean Lim stresses the excessive use of disposable plastics and exceedingly low rates of plastic recycling in Singapore (i.e. 4%, NEA 2022). Meanwhile, Karina Lalchand Sheri (2022a) investigates the extent to which run-of-river mega dams in the Amazon are more sustainable (and less disruptive to river morphology) compared to their traditional counterparts (with large reservoirs).
The second strand evident in this volume considers the intersections between climate change (education) and (environmentally) sustainable practices. Jean Lim and Goh Xin Fang discuss the content knowledge and necessary attitudes that educators ought to possess in order to meet the learning objectives of climate change education in Singapore’s secondary schools. Jean Lim is concerned about how well-equipped pre-service (student) teachers are with the rudiments of plastic recycling, whereas Goh Xin Fang is eager to know what in-service Chemistry teachers think and do about climate change education in their lessons. In her second article, Karina Lalchand Sheri (2022b) foregrounds thoughtful measures that teachers deploy to alleviate climate-change induced heat stress in their schools. Finally, Colin Leong and Ong Zhi Qing are enthusiastic about the pedagogical affordances of digitally-enabled learning vis-à-vis Adva (a carbon calculator smart-phone application) and game-based learning vis-à-vis Getting to zero (a physical card game developed locally on getting to zero carbon emissions) respectively. While monitoring one’s carbon footprint through the use of Adva promotes carbon light living on an individual scale, Getting to zero focuses on the same pressing issue but on a national/institutional scale.
More crucially, these articles (in)directly shed light on an often neglected aspect of purportedly environmentalist and/or sustainable practices — that of sustaining them, as opposed to piece-meal, tokenistic or perfunctory attempts at doing so. For instance, Karina Lalchand Sheri (2022b) is at pains to emphasize that technocratic responses (e.g. air-conditioning) to climate change induced challenges (e.g. thermal discomfort from warming) are rarely good long-term solutions, and often create other problems (e.g. more carbon emissions, financial cost).