In the year 1999, the Environmental Education Team was established. Known as the EE Team, they started with the LIFE program, or Learning Interdependently for the Environment, touring coastal communities across Southern Batangas in a blue van adorned with paintings of different species found in the Philippines. The team first focused on students, but as they progressed further into their work they began reaching out to educators through the WWF EE Teacher’s Training, with modules such as Wildlife Conservation, Waste Management and Climate Change, among others. “You’ll see… [participants] can already teach [environmental education] on their own. [We’re teaching others] to be teachers,” says Dino Calderon, Project Manager of the EE team. Part of the EE team’s work, says Dino, is to train others to become future environmental educators themselves.

“It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that people don’t know the consequences,” says Kim Marcelo, partner and project officer on the EE team. With long-standing issues such as the loss of biodiversity and climate change now coupled with emergent problems such as plastic pollution, the team recognizes that action must also come from the public. “Like now,” adds Calderon, “Even teachers, they know [these issues] are bad, but they don’t think about everyday things they can do.”