Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Swiss School

          SUMAS (SUSTAINABILITY MANAGEMENT SCHOOL) 


Video #1:


• Is an innovative unique business school that is focused only on sustainability.

• Sumas is located in Switzerland, in the town of Gland. Gland is on the western side of the country, near Geneva and the border with France.

•It divides it’s education between regular business management education and scientific knowledge for sustainable development.

• Students from SUMAS arte being taught the importance of sustainability and how that can be applied to business management (bringing sustainability to everyday life jobs). It is the only business school in Europe that offers both the bachelor and the masters of business administration in sustainability management.

• They are also taught hands-on guidance on how to bring sustainability to the business environment. They need to understand the life cycle analysis to be able to start in the learning process at SUMAS.

• SUMAS also provides a great variety of freedom to their students. They are offered all kinds of sports (including water sports that are practiced  in the lake). 



Video #2:

• The Case Study in this video is that the world is slowly deteriorating because of the innovations of the human race. There is a system called the Ecological Footprint Calculation, which tells you the surface are needed to produce the resources we consume in daily life and also to absorb the waste generated by the use of these resources.

• If we do not make any changes to the way we produce stuff, by 2050 we would need twice the surface area of the earth to be able to absorb the wastes and the carbon dioxide produces.

•We need to make sure that people are now using ecological sources that we can recycle, and most importantly, that people do.

• The European Commission has decided to put on a mayor action plan. They include a range of proposal and additional measures that focus on improving the products in the market for consumers; they need to make sure that whatever they label is understandable to the consumers. That is why the “Eco” label in Europe is so important. 



Video #3: 

• The 10 hottest years in the history of the planet have happened in the last 14 years. The hottest of all was 2005. The scientific consensus is that humans are causing global warming.

• They talk about how the ice caps and the snow in Mount Kilimanjaro for example are melting each time faster. The increase of temperature is causing stronger storms every year. Hurricane Katrina for example was one of the most devastating hurricanes that had struck in a very long time.

• They make a study about the melting of the arctic and the Antarctic and how the sea level would increase for at least 20 feet. They show many populated parts of the world that are at sea level and how they would be flooded, they also talk about the amount of refugees. 



Video #4:

• They are mounting and flying a plane that can technically fly forever because it is powered by solar energy. All of the technologies that the airplane contains come from companies that do not belong to the aviation world. It was launched in the NASA.

RAN OUT OF TIME OF WATCHING THE REST OF THE VIDEOS






Activity #2: 


I live in Bogotá, Colombia. Bogotá is not only the capital of Colombia but also its largest and most industrialized city. Industrialized cities can be very helpful for the economy of the country, but also they can be damaging to the environment. Today, Bogotá is ranked one of the most polluted cities in South America and even worldwide because of all the pollution emitted from transportation systems, factories and even from animal pollution from the farms that are located in the outskirts of this huge city. The problem that Bogotá has is that its corporations and companies do not take into consideration the amount of sustainability that it actually has. As a consequence, it takes everything to the extreme.

            Sustainability can be implemented in Bogotá in many different ways. The systems of transportation can be fixed because about 100% of public transportation belong buses that pollute a lot. It can also take the ideas that other cities have implemented in the area of public transportation. Some of these ideas are: trolleys (Helsinki, Finland), subways (NYC), cable ways (Medellin, Colombia) and many others that exist around the world that have been proven to be sustainable and to lower the level of pollution. Also, they could disperse the factories to other areas of the department to at least have a sustainable territory within the city. Bogotá is located in the middle of the country, in a region of farmland (mainly Cundinamarca) so factories can be dispersed around this department to be able to have a more sustainable Bogotá. 

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