I

never ever imagined that a small step I made with partners in the community I’m now running, GARUDA Youth Community (GYC), would hand me a ticket funded by the University of Indonesia (UI) in collaboration with the World Student Environmental Network to fly to Frankfurt, Germany, for the third World Student Environmental Summit.

I and partners in GYC made a small contribution to the campus by providing new classified-bins, working with scavengers in the vicinity of the campus to pick up sorted waste and conducting a massive campaign called “Save Our Earth” around the campus by distributing a petition, selling eco-friendly products, such as handicrafts from non-organic waste and organizing a seminar and workshop on environmental issues.

The program was considered applicable, efficient and sustainable by the judges, so I and Sandy Ikhfal, one of my colleagues, were given the privilege to present the project through discourse and poster display in front of 80 undergraduate and graduate students from 25 countries worldwide from America, the European Union, Africa, Asia to Australia.

Rajendra Pachauri, the president of the IPCC and Nobel Prize laureate, was the patron of this third event, which took place at the University of Tubingen, about five hours’ drive from Frankfurt, Germany. At this time, the summit was elaborated with a visible carbon offset project.

This five-day program contributed numerous unforgettable and life-changing experiences. On the day of arrival, we staged an intercultural performance. Each delegation was to present arts and culture that represented their respective countries.

Every morning, we attended public lectures with speeches from experts in their respective fields, such as Lenelis Kruse-Graumann, vice chair of the German National Committee of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD), Arnulf Dinkel as the representative of Abu Dhabi of the Fraunhofer-Institute for Solar Energy System (ISE) and Bill McKibben, founder of the organization 350.org.

Having been served with a stock of knowledge in the morning session, we started to compose a resolution. To truly represent the global population, we were divided into economy, politics and civil society.

I took part in the latter group. The resolution, then, was submitted directly to Parliamentary State Secretary of the German Federal Minister of Environment, national scale governing politicians in each country and rector in each university once we arrived home.

In December, the proposal will be conveyed by Prof. Hatta, the president of Doshisha University, to the COP16 in Mexico. The previous two summits took the report to the COP15 and the G8-Summit.

One of my favorite activities was exchanging information and insights during project presentation sessions. The most impressive project plan for me was the “eco-city” model in Masdar from United Arab Emirates’ delegates.

Masdar City was designed to provide a luxurious quality of life with the lowest environmental footprint in a city and to promote low carbon innovation through a variety of renewable power resources to reduce GHG emissions.

In a global scale summit where high-level dialog is involved, all participants went with some ideas to discover and develop fundamental enlightenment in order to attain a sustainable society that possesses deep concern toward environmental and social needs of present and future generations and then came back with a full bag to be implemented in their own local environment.

— Photos Courtesy of David Immanuel Sihombing