On the weekend of 3–5 October, Jessice Chen, Gammy Sukijbumrung and Katherine Wang attended the World AIMS Weekend as representatives for Queenswood. Katherine reports.

We looked at climate coalition, exploring how human action affects climate around the world and examining the severe effects it has on our daily lives. There were several different sessions where we talked to different charities that deal either with climate change itself or with natural disaster as a consequence of climate change.

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On the first evening, the representatives from all the Methodist Schools were asked to think about how climate change would eventually cause us to lose the things we love. We each came up with a short sentence beginning with ‘For the love of…’, expressing what is it that we love in the world that would be affected by climate change. It was shocking to consider how many things could be affected by the climate, and the fact that none of us had paid any attention to this before.

Next morning, we talked to some university students from the international development organisation ‘Engineers Without Borders’ and learned how we could improve sustainability by using wind power instead of burning fossil fuels. Later we were introduced to a charity called ‘Shelter Box’, which helps countries affected by natural disasters, providing survival kits that are delivered to the people as soon as a catastrophe happens. In the afternoon, we had a talk from Tearfund Charity, discussing Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and how the charity helped the refugees to have a better standard of life and escape poverty. This made us realise that in order to reduce tragedies like this, we need to do more to protect the world we are living in. In the evening, an Echo Poet recited some of his own poetry with enthusiasm and encouraged us to have a go, passing on the message of protecting the environment in a different way.

On Sunday morning we had our final activity. Our three different themes were ‘do all we can’, ‘change all we can’ and ‘pray all we can’. We discussed what we can do personally or as a school to make little changes in order to ease climate change. We came up with ideas, such as competitions between schools to see who could save the most amount of energy in a fortnight, or going without meat for a day. One school had saved enough energy in a fortnight to run a car for a year, which is very impressive. We may bring these ideas into our school and encourage more people to care about our environment.

Overall, I think this was a superb experience and we are all very lucky to have the chance to attend the World AIMS Weekend. We learned a lot about the world we are living in and understood the fact that it needs our care and protection. We hope to spread the message across the whole school: everyone should be more aware of the smallest details in their lives that could make a big change to our environment.