Meeting Mr. Vouloudis highlighted (to me) how little I know about Abu Dhabi’s – and even the greater UAE’s current sustainability efforts. Learning about the green building regulations was a real eye opener and I think it is really innovative that the Abu Dhabi government came up with a gamified way to engage companies on sustainability. I also appreciated Mr. Vouloudis’ honesty about the difficulty of getting such policies passed. In one of my recent classes called ‘Solving Public Problems’, I had pitch a policy suggestion to a Malawian local district representative and it required immense effort just to make my proposal sound feasible. So I truly respect the push made by the Department of Municipalities, which echoes the advice given by the speaker about the importance of negotiation and consensus-building skills in the fight to promote sustainability.
It would be interesting if there was more public awareness about this rating system. I think letting people know (generally) which companies are doing well might provide good publicity that incentivises other companies to do better as well.
I also learned about the project that set up sustainability ‘spaces’ across the city through funding from the Ghadan 21 Fund. After hearing that I live 10 minutes away from one of these installations I will most definitely be visiting. But this also made me think that it would be interesting to have a map of where all of these installations are located in the city and whether they are easily accessible to everyone. Saadiyat is a somewhat up-scale location and if the other ‘sustainable spaces’ are located in similar up-scale places, then I would see that these projects more as a very exclusive and largely aesthetic type of advocacy.
I also appreciated learning about the different types of plastic in class and now find myself spending more time looking at recycling labels out of curiosity. Before this point the recycling numbers were absolutely irrelevant but now I increasingly realise how much more complicated recycling my plastic 20+ hair products, numerous accessories and multiple water bottles would be. One practical step that I’ll be taking this week is to buy myself a water bottle and looking into DIY natural-hair treatments or zero-waste curly-hair products.
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