Waterford students pitch at Dragon's Den style environmental awards

Young people from Waterford were among 40 teams from schools and youth groups across Munster who took part in the regional semi-finals of the Young Environmentalist Awards (YEA) recently.

Those shortlisted included a team from Blackwater Community School, with their project focusing on ECO community development. Their project asked the question “are observatories seeing as much as they can?”, in order to examine the impact light pollution has, and raise awareness of it in the local Waterford community.

Run by ECO-UNESCO, the Young Environmentalist Awards is an all-Ireland environmental awards programme that recognises the work of young people who have taken environmental action in their school or community and come up with creative solutions to solve environmental issues.

The semi-final rounds of the YEA competition are known as ECO Dens, where groups from across the country are chosen to present their environmental projects at Dragons Den style events to a panel of experts.

Commenting on the semi-finals, Elaine Nevin, Director of ECO-UNESCO, said: “We’ve kicked off this year’s ECO-UNESCO Young Environmentalist Awards with our second round of semi-finals in the Old Cork Waterworks Experience. It’s a testament to the passion young people in Ireland have for solving environmental issues with over 65,000 young people participating over the last 25 years."

“It’s fantastic to see such a spread of entries this year, from across 30 counties with projects ranging from investigating wind turbine efficiency to the importance of worms in biodiversity," she added. "Unfortunately, not every team can go through to our Young Environmentalist Awards finals, but we are delighted to see such high numbers of young people entering and carrying out such innovative environmental action projects locally."