I feel like participating in the Virtual CAS Conference widened my knowledge on environmental factors worldwide. I feel like I learnt a lot considering environmental growth and development, the challenges facing the environment and what we can do to ensure preservation and sustainability of our environment. The major challenge I faced was interacting with fellow students I hadn’t interacted with before, and the skill I developed was efficiently communicating with people and collaborating accordingly towards achieving a common goal.
This experience has inspired me to initiate a CAS activity of my own towards environmental preservation given the right moment. This experience required me to demonstrate perseverance or commitment through having to attend all the interactions throughout and work with my team towards doing the best we could in the charity hackathon at the end of the conference. My role in the team was thinking of ideas, how they could be implemented and phrasing them accordingly within the presentation, I played a major role in motivating my team towards doing the best we could, and also creating an efficient medium of communication outside of the conference.
I learnt that in a team, you have to encourage and support each other towards achieving your common goal whatever it is. I feel like I engaged majorly with the global issue of plastic pollution and the effects it has on the environment varying, from degrading the quality of soils to it being one of the major causes of sea turtle deaths mostly within western Africa. The presentations really taught me a lot about this global issue and the Plastic Punch organisation explained these issues within Nigeria, and the initiatives being put in place to ensure reduction in plastic deposition within the environment.
Considering the ethics of my own actions, this weekend really challenged my beliefs and it was also very beneficial. The experience has inspired me very much to monitor plastic consumption and deposition as much as I can within my society starting from my home, because it is doing a lot of harm being dumped and not recycled. Some of the facts mentioned during the conference, including the fact that over a million species of living organisms are being threatened to extinction as a result of environmental degradation, rose a lot of concern within me about our own safety.
