Can we create the perfect earth by 2030?

Image of planet earth from nasa.gov

All of you might be wondering, “how can we make earth great again?” or what can you do to help change earth into a better planet for our future generations. The answer may surprise you….. the answer is Sustainable Development Goals!

What is Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? you might ask, well the SDGs are a collection of 17 global goals set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 for the year 2030. All 17 goals of SDG addresses most, if not all of the main global challenges and they are interconnected in such a way because of the principle it was build upon. Sustainable Development Goals was built on the principle of “Leaving no one behind”, the purpose of SDG is to be the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all of us and the future generations to come.

17 Goals of SDG, picture from un.org

As you can see from the 17 goals there are a whole lot of topics we can talk about but the 3 main topics I want to discuss are Clean Water and Sanitation, Quality Education and Life Below Water.

We can’t deny that to achieve any sort of success in anything in life you need a great education as a base. A great education doesn’t mean having a doctoral degree but having the basic knowledge that we can use in our everyday situations. We are able to judge the quality of education in our country by looking at the statistics of how competitive our workforce is in the open market and the unemployment rate in our country.

Graphic provided by tirto.id

As we can see Indonesia is ranked 6th in ASEAN for its workforce competitiveness. We are way behind other countries especially Singapore, overthought Singapore is a way younger country than Indonesia they easily doubled our competitiveness rate because they have a great education system. Comparing our education system to other countries according to Prosperity.com we are ranked 71st in the world while Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia are ranked 3rd, 23rd, and 41st respectively.

To simplify the main problems that are causing Indonesia to have such a low quality of educations are Firstly the system is a high volume — low quality. What I mean is that a lot of schools in Indonesia are over packed from my own personal experience I was lucky enough to enroll at a private school that has a better quality of education because of the cost that goes into the institution. In all of my school life my class always have a minimum of 35 students and the most was 43, this amount of students in a class makes it impossible for the teacher to make sure that every student understands the lesson while in other cases the number of students in a class is more suitable for learning which is in my opinion around 15–20 students but the quality of education isn’t as high.

Second is the quality of an educator in Indonesia is considerably lower than the global standards this is caused by a combination of a lot of things. The main reason is a lot of teachers and educators don’t take their job seriously, Why? There’s a public perception that because teachers don’t make a whole ton of money like say a doctor does so they don’t really care about the growth and development of the students. Another reason is that a lot of them are appointed on the basis of loyalty, friendship, and familial connections rather than their ability to be an educator.

The third is the lack of quality infrastructure. According to the summary of School Statistics of the education year 2017–2018 done by the minister of education and culture of Indonesia there are more than 90.000 classes which are highly damage and more than 60.000 are considered unusable. There are more than 10.000 school libraries that are damaged and also from a total of more than 200.000 schools in Indonesia less than 25% have a science lab.

We must start fixing this glaring problem in our education system so that we are able to give our future generations a great quality education. One of the solution is that the people who are lucky enough to have studied or is studying at a high-quality education institution should teach those who are less fortunate, one of the things that I like about a lot of Indonesian colleges is that the students must do a mandatory public or community service activity in order to graduate. I attend Bina Nusantara University (BINUS) and in order for the students to be able to graduate they have to fulfill a certain amount of community service activity hour, in BINUS this kind of activity is supported by Teach For Indonesia (TFI) with the help of Teach For Indonesia Student Community (TFISC).

TFI is a real example of an organization trying to help better the quality of education through a variety of activities that includes providing teaching to a lot of communities for free! They collaborate with the college students in which the ones teaching the kids at the communities are the college students. This kinds of activities are eye-opening for a lot of people and it also raises awareness about how poor the quality of education is in some areas, with students taking part and gaining experience from activities like this the hope is that they will contribute in helping better the quality of education through their own ways.

The next SDG that I want to talk about is Clean Water and Sanitation. It is a proven fact that human being needs water in order to survive, we cannot last more than a day without drinking water but the problem is that a lot of people don’t have access to clean water. For a lot of people, the only or main source of water for them is from the river, lakes or even from the sea that has been contaminated and shouldn’t be consumed but they don’t have a choice because there is no other source of water let alone clean water.

Image from vestergaard.com

The fact of the matter is a lot of rivers, lakes have been contaminated by the waste created from human activities in fact 80% of the waste created ends up in the rivers, lakes, and ocean without even being filtered. 2.4 billion people lack access to basic sanitation services, such as toilets or latrines so they continue to practice open defecation that contaminates our clean waters. The consumption of contaminated water can be detrimental to the person health each day, nearly 1,000 children die due to preventable water and sanitation-related diarrheal diseases that include Cholera, and other serious illnesses such as Guinea worm disease, Typhoid, and Dysentery.

Water is key to human survival and because of that, we should be striving for Clean Water and Sanitation for all people to access. To achieve that goal we must stop throwing waste into our lakes, river, and sea in order to prevent those actions the government should enforce the law on these big companies and penalize them dearly if they so choose to throw waste into our waters. The government and the people should also work together in cleaning our contaminated waters, a great example is Citarum river one of the most contaminated rivers in the world is being cleaned by the Indonesian government with help of the local community and the army in order to provide the people with clean water

Video from Make A Change World’s YouTube channel

The last SDG I want to talk about today is Life Below Water. The ocean covers basically three-quarters of planet earth and I have already explained to you guys on how important water is for human beings so yeah this is a big deal. We must keep the ocean clean from waste and trash because we the ocean provides 50% of the oxygen that we need to live if our ocean is contaminated and destroyed it would directly affect our survivability, the ocean also absorbs about 30 percent of carbon dioxide produced by humans, buffering the impacts of global warming.

A dirty and contaminated ocean also affects the animals that live in the sea, the ocean contains nearly 200,000 identified species of sea creatures and if their home is destroyed a lot them can go extinct quickly. The ocean plays a big part in the world’s economy because it is the main source of income for over three billion people especially for countries like Japan whose economy is highly affected by the marine sector. One thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that the ocean is very crucial in the medical world as it is the main source of components for many medical products that help fight cancer and heart disease just to name a few.

Some of the ways we can help achieve Life Below Water and keeping the ocean clean is to reduce plastic usage because 50–80% of the trash that ends up in the sea is plastic, by reducing the usage of one time use plastic and using recyclable plastic you are lessening the plastic pollution in the sea. We should also boycott products that use endangered animal species such as shark for their product materials, by not buying their products they will stop harming the endangered species and we can preserve them from going extinct.

In conclusion, even though I only discussed 3 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals I hope that it sheds a light on how important it is to achieve these goals in order for a better and more sustainable future. Thank You!

We humans are all different but we only have one earth and it’s what we all have in common so we must take care of it not for me or you but for us.