Two Bruneian Delegates, Hjh Siti Norfarwizah Hj Mohd Ja’afar from Kilang ReRoot (@kilangreroot.bn) and Muhammad Hazmie Hj Piut from Green Brunei (@greenbrunei) spent their weekend in Bangkok, Thailand on the 31st March-1st April to attend a 2-day program of the EU-ASEAN Youth Conference on Sustainable Urban Development. The 2 representatives went to the conference with their experiences in organizing projects that are environmentally sustainable to share outlooks with other ASEAN-EU youth representatives during the program.
The first day began with a sharing session in which youth representatives from ASEAN and EU discussed their respective organizations, followed by a panel discussion on unleashing the potential of young people in promoting sustainable urban development, in the afternoon. During the panel, EU-ASEAN youth representatives engaged with policymakers and practitioners to explore how young people can play a central role in promoting sustainable urban development.
Siti Jaafar, the Founder of Kilang ReRoot (KRR) was able to share her current project called ‘The Balkony Project’ during the discussions. It is an 8-month program that was recently initiated in March with a total of 34 successfully registered participants to join exciting gardening masterclasses, including workshops such as woodworking, farm visits, talks from local experts in the industry, farm-to-table cooking and many more. This project hopes to maximize home spaces for edible gardens to sustain livelihood at the comfort of their homes, and within cities.
Siti believes “to conserve our biodiversity, we need to learn to co-exist in shared landscapes for a sustainable life benefit from the resources we already have to encourage efficient development”.
The morning session of the second day consisted of presentations on the various ways youth can contribute to solutions by advocating for change, developing innovative solutions and collaborating with community groups, where they shared examples of successful youth-led initiatives in urban areas. Meanwhile, in the afternoon, the ASEAN youth representatives had discussions in groups to plan a possible 4 months project on sustainable urban development.
The outcome of the discussion of Hazmie’s group is to make a project on creating a Toolkit which will include a How-to, ways of living a sustainable life in the city, which can be implemented in every city of ASEAN. The project will be introduced to an ongoing project from Myanmar called Young City Shapers by Doh Eain, where they do online courses relating to sustainable urban development and the Toolkit will be implemented into one of the modules in the course.
In Hazmie’s words “environmental sustainability is not an individual effort, but a collective responsibility. Only by working together can we create a greener and more sustainable future for ourselves and the generations to come.”
