ENEAS - THE FIRST YEAR

The United Nations declared 2005-2014 as the “UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.”
Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development look for promoting motivations and action abilities dedicated to the construction of more sustainable societies and models of development. According to Agenda 21 it is important for sustainable societies to offer to young people opportunities to participate in process that affect their lives. Environmental Monitoring in scholar context plays a main roll in this topic.

ENEAS – (European Network for Environmental Assessment and Services) is a network of schools and universities, headquartered in the Faculty of Engineering of the University of the Port, consisting of national schools; ITC (International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation) and local governments that do environmental monitoring tasks, making possible, by this way, the implementation Local and Scholar Agenda 21.

One of the targets of ENEAS consists of training school teachers in basic scientific procedures of environmental monitoring, becoming teacher and student active agents in the environment analysis, contributing this way for the improvement of teaching - learning process and for the development of abilities in the area of the citizenship. These methods will also serve to initiate the students in the experimental practice in an integrated scientific context. During the training the teachers organized themselves in work groups. These groups integrated also students and guaranteed the daily implementation of experimental protocols. The target of the protocols was to evaluate the evolution of air quality throughout the time and also to make its spatial comparison. Since the beginning of the training until the end of the last academic year, the schools have collected approximately 1000 georeferenced measures, relative to the protocols of Precipitation, Atmospheric Pressure, Clouds and Aerosols.

At the same time, a pilot project in P-GIS (Participatory Geographic Information Systems) with a primary school in the region of Oporto was started in this academic year. The main target is to know and understand the factors that children and teenagers consider as a threat to its well-being and quality of life of their community and to represent these perceptions through maps, statistical and multimedia analyses.

The process of implementation of the Project has been very dynamic and interactive and the field work with the different involved stakeholders has become a very enriching experience.