Student - June 28, 2007
Students write report for Prague green belt
Environmental Sciences MSc students presented the final report on their European Workshop last Friday, 22 June. Thirty students had worked for eight weeks on a report for the ministry of environment in the Czech Republic, with recommendations for the Green Belt surrounding Prague.
‘Thirty of us worked together on the report – you can imagine how much coordination that required. We had a management team of five, and they did an awful lot of work. We presented our conclusions at the ministry in Prague, which sounds fantastic, but was actually a bit of an anticlimax. There weren’t many people there and we had to phrase everything very carefully rather than coming out with hard statements. ‘You’ve only been working on the subject for two weeks, so you might be wrong,’ was the message we got. I’m afraid the report will just disappear into a filing cabinet somewhere, although the Green Party is in the government and the Green Belt is one of their focal points.’
Karen Fortuin, one of the teachers in Wageningen: ‘The value of this project is that 15 nationalities worked together in a group. I noticed that they were all pretty much of the same level. We deliberately gave them a lot of freedom to find their own solutions to problems. They worked really hard and the level is very high.’