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Jolene Otremba

Read more of SCMP’s Good Schools Guide
The year 2023 is going to be a big one for global green efforts, as it is the midpoint of the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which outlined the vital and widely touted goals adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015.
As much of the world finally moves on from the aftermath of Covid-19, its leaders must place a renewed focus on the health of not just our people, but our planet.
And they are not alone. Governments may work on a global level to enact changes that will have a sizeable impact, but on the ground, pupils around the world are also putting their best foot forward to effect relatively small changes that help towards making a big impact.
In Hong Kong, international schools are taking a lead and have firmly embedded environmental sustainability into school curricula. And that is not all, most have also taken concrete steps to ensure that the operations of their schools are sustainable. In fact, many have even gone so far as to hire or bring in experts to help with their sustainability efforts. From energy audits to campus designs, most are now taking a scientific approach to data collection to identify opportunities for carbon reduction as well as create a framework to reduce waste.

One such example is Hong Kong International School (HKIS). The school recently hired Raman Paravaikkarasu as its director of facilities management. He previously worked as assistant vice-president of engineering for the Shangri-La International Hotel Management group, facilitating their sustainability efforts.
Since coming on board, Paravaikkarasu has helped HKIS to establish goals and targets for its sustainability management, and assisted in developing baseline inventory for its two campuses. The school is now developing a central data management platform to track carbon data to continuously identify energy and carbon reduction opportunities.
“We have figured out where we want to go, so we’re engaging the baseline, because anywhere that you want to go, you need to know where you are – how much energy are we spending, how much water we are using, all that – and then we can do trend analysis and figure out what should be our benchmarking. That’s the first step,” said Paravaikkarasu.
The next step is to set up short- and long-term targets based on these baseline numbers so that the school and everyone involved has concrete goals that they can work towards. “We don’t want to do things in bits and pieces, but rather take a holistic approach to managing sustainability,” Paravaikkarasu explained.
HKIS is not alone in taking such initiatives. Across the board, many other international schools have gone down the same path and enlisted companies for their expertise. Harrow International School Hong Kong and the English Schools Foundation (ESF) have both sought the services of En-Trak, a proptech company which advises clients on how to make their buildings or office spaces more efficient by reducing carbon footprints and operating costs.
“We have engaged with En-trak to monitor our energy usage, with a view to using this data to find ways to reduce our energy consumption,” said Naina Nightingale, an English teacher and lead on sustainability in school at Harrow.
Crucially, the full school audit, to be completed this academic year, will provide an assessment of current practices in all areas of the school and En-trak will work with Harrow to implement systems and procedures to make its practices more sustainable.
Nightingale is excited by this because she believes it is key to realising systemic changes throughout the school, which would include working with pupils by embedding educational material on sustainability in the curriculum.
She said this would be the next step in the school’s strategy of bringing sustainability to the fore and ensuring all pupils are appropriately educated in the area. “We believe our pupils to be leaders of the future and global citizens, and a full understanding of the importance of sustainable habits and awareness is becoming ever more crucial,” she added.
Indeed, both schools agree that creating awareness and giving ownership to students to take the lead is equally important to drive change. The overarching emphasis is that creating a sustainable environment does not rest on the shoulders of the school management alone, and most are concurrently taking a top-down as well as a student-led approach to boost their sustainability efforts.
We believe our pupils to be leaders of the future and global citizens, and a full understanding of the importance of sustainable habits and awareness is becoming ever more crucial
Naina Nightingale, English teacher and lead on sustainability at Harrow
“When students get this education now and understand the importance and rationale, they can contribute to its success. They are the future. While we can all do these things, it’s particularly important to get students on board so that they can contribute to society,” HKIS’s Paravaikkarasu said.
In 2019, ESF made headlines when a group of its senior students came together to launch a new sustainable strategy for the entire network. The document written and proposed by the students contained ideas and initiatives that were implemented across all 22 of the group’s schools.
Further to that, in the past two years a group of ESF students from Renaissance College (RCHK) and ESF King George V School (KGV) overcame the challenges posed by Covid-19 and delivered several outstanding sustainable projects across the school network.
Their efforts resulted in a large-scale solar panel network being installed at eight ESF schools, reducing emissions by almost 280 tonnes. Other initiatives included a Clean Air Committee at Island School and reducing food waste with ESF’s food provider, Chartwells, at RCHK.
Their ambitious efforts were not only recognised by the ESF community, but they also were put forward for the prestigious CLP Smart Energy Awards.
“It was a natural step for our students to be responsible for developing the organisation’s sustainability strategy and remain accountable for its annual review,” said Stewart Redden, ESF’s learning and teaching adviser. “The strategy serves as the framework for each school to develop its own sustainability targets while drawing on the expertise and experience of the whole organisation. It is through this agency that ESF students have developed the capacity and agility to make a difference.”

While individual awards are inspiring, ESF students recognise that schools shouldn’t work in silos but instead should have a common goal of making the planet a more sustainable place for all. For this reason, Redden said students are keen to embrace collaborative efforts across the network, and are eager to take ownership of their own environments to share best practices with each other.
“Overall, the international school system is a very collaborative community for enhancing sustainability,” said Louna Larose, a Year 13 student at RCHK who leads the Secondary Student Council.
“Many different schools are working together to share improvements on sustainability, and there are school-wide competitions like Nature Works Pitch Day organised with The Nature Conservancy to help identify a problem and propose solutions,” added Larose. This progressive bid-based competition awards the winning team a budget of up to a HK$10,000 to implement change in its community.
Of course, sustainability efforts require change and it’s not always easy getting stakeholders to buy in. Recognising this, Harrow Hong Kong has been working with all its community stakeholders including parents and external providers to raise any issues around sustainability and encourage inquisitive leaders to help tackle problems.
But schools also need to work on changing long-held habits and an attachment to the status quo, something that doesn’t come easy. Nightingale said, “That’s why it is really important that we lead by example in our day-to-day operations.”
Starting from its curriculum, Harrow Hong Kong has a selection of “super-curricular” classes related to environmental sustainability, and these sessions look at things from a micro to a macro level with the aim of encouraging pupils to improve their daily habits and build towards more large-scale solutions. The school has also introduced a Sustainability Week, which takes place during the first term of each academic year, to raise environmental awareness throughout the school.
“The idea is that we get the whole school community thinking about how to make day-to-day habits more sustainable at the beginning of the year with a view to embedding these good habits beyond merely just a week,” said Ann Haydon, head of Harrow Hong Kong.
Others couldn’t agree more. At HKIS, students are visibly excited whenever the topic of sustainability comes up, and most already have the basic knowledge. The real question, then, is where does it go from here?
According to Paravaikkarasu, the road will be long, so it is important to educate students in terms of their long-term goals and how they can apply those to their daily lives. He said students need to learn to crawl, walk and only then run, and the job of educators is to ensure that they stay on the right track, understand the bigger picture and make sustainability meaningful within an overall framework.
According to Carrie Chen, director of marketing at HKIS, the efforts need to be top down in terms of buildings’ infrastructure and the school environment, but must be student led to become part of the ethos of being a future leader.


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How Hong Kong schools are going beyond academics to help students cultivate a charitable spirit

How Hong Kong schools are promoting cultural diversity and understanding – through shared celebrations and festivals

Good Schools Guide

International schools in Hong Kong are bringing environmental sustainability into their curricula, while ensuring their operations are sustainable

Hong Kong’s international schools are in agreement that letting students take the lead on sustainability is crucial. Photo: Ocean Material

Renaissance College Hong Kong students Ankita Joshi, Jane Chan and Taylor Chung started a solar project in 2019, to produce electricity and connect to CLP’s power grid. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

ESF recognises the importance of implanting awareness of our environmental impact at an early age. Photo: Edmond So

Special Reports

News

Hong Kong

Education

Schools like HKIS, Harrow Hong Kong and ESF are hiring experts to help them to reduce their carbon footprint and cut down on waste
Pupils have sessions to view micro to macro aspects on how they can improve their daily habits and work towards large-scale solutions


To make the meaningful change the growing climate crisis demands, it is the next generation of thinkers that will lead the fight into the future


Education in Hong Kong

International schools in Hong Kong

International schools in Hong Kong are bringing environmental sustainability into their curricula, while ensuring their operations are sustainable

Schools like HKIS, Harrow Hong Kong and ESF are hiring experts to help them to reduce their carbon footprint and cut down on waste Pupils have sessions to view micro to macro aspects on how they can improve their daily habits and work towards large-scale solutions

Schools like HKIS, Harrow Hong Kong and ESF are hiring experts to help them to reduce their carbon footprint and cut down on waste

Pupils have sessions to view micro to macro aspects on how they can improve their daily habits and work towards large-scale solutions