Capacity Building Towards Green City

Going green is no more a choice for glory, but a must for survival. For the first time, we heard about heavy snow in Taiwan, flooding in south east of Australia while draught was occurred in the western part of Australia, heavy snow in New York and across Europe. In Malaysia, high temperature is felt every day. What happen then?

Many believe this is the phenomena of climate change. The effect is for real and affect everyone in the globe. It means everyone has the responsibility to at least bring down the negative of climate change due to his/her own action. For example, if we are producing CO2 by driving, then please do it responsibly or to try to redeem it by carrying out some remedy works.

Unfortunately nobody will want to do it unless it is for own conscience and passion. Everyone is hoping others to do it or only want to do so if the impact is directing hitting him/her. For example, we will not tolerate of heavy traffic coming into our neighbourhood but think it is ok if a through road by passing other neighbourhood for our accessibility. We are angry about uncollected rubbish but will not feel like doing something to reduce the waste generation. In the end of the day, social responsibility is never our top priority unless it is life threatening or affecting our health or life.

One of the classic example is we do not mind to install water filter for clean water because we ourselves are consuming it and any unwanted polluted water will affect our health. However, we never realise that polluted water for treatment is not coming only from the river but from our house which is discharging the waste water from our kitchen or toilet. It means we are the one who create the problem of pollution. While waste water was connected to the sewage tank directly during construction period, renovation work immediately after the handing over of new house has some how rather re pipe the discharge directly onto the back lane drain without any treatment.

While many of us have the desire to go green and to do our small part, we are handicapped by little knowledge, skill or awareness we acquired. So, for Green City of Petaling Jaya to take place, first thing to do is enhancing the knowledge and skill of all stakeholders, I presume.