I learned many things from the bilateral conference with the school in the Philippines. First of all I learnt about a bit of the landscape and weather in the Philippines like how they experience 8-9 tropical cyclones and how the Philippines are many islands and not a whole land mass. Some of the land features in the Philippines are mountains, volcanoes and mangroves. Then I learnt about the issue that they chose which was dolomite mining. The issue with dolomite mining is that the dolomite gets mined at Cebu and gets transported to Manilla which is approximately 830km away and it gets dumped on the beaches in Manilla Bay and it creates white sand. The way the government is trying to get rid of the problem is to beautify the beaches by getting rid of the mangroves which protects the lands during the many cyclones during the year. I learnt that mangrove coverage went from 70% in 1938 down to 20% in 2007, decreasing a whopping 50%. I learnt the many effects of the white sand not only on the environment, but on people to. The white sand in Manilla Bays destroys reefs and marine life with in 500m of the land. There are a lot of repertory issues due to the white sand as well as the use of kerosene and the air pollution of carbon. The way that the community were fixing the problem was a petition to dig out the white sand and replace it with mangroves, it has around 771 signatures so far. I also learnt that the president is neglecting the climate issue.

In my opinion I think that the school from the Philippines had a way better Power Point then us and they organised an even amount of speaking.

The school from the Philippines had a very big challenge cause they have been in lock down since March and they had to individually join the zoom meeting where as we could go to school and do the conference at school where they set up the meeting for us, but the school from the Philippines still managed to do an outstanding job of presenting the power point and introducing themselves.

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