Blogs
Davis Ryland, Townsville, Australia
Bilateral Blog
Throughout the approximate 2-hour web conference that was hosted between us and the Philippines, I learnt many of the issues and problems that are occurring in their country that effect their economic status, there population, and their marine life. These three main factors include water population with around 58% of ground water being contaminated and unable to be consumed due to neglect. Additionally, air population is another factor and according to a recent study, the Philippines is indeed considered unsafe to live in. The last and most important factor that the Philippines students in the web conference spoke about is the overuse of dolomite. This dolomite use is linked to the extreme decrease in marine life as any corals within a 500-metre radius of dolomite mines have died because of this radiation. And despite all of these problems that are taking place nowadays, the Philippines students informed us that there is still no attention that is being put towards reducing these issues even though they are all slowly killing both their country and the world.
The Philippines students’ and our own case studies were similar in the sense that we both included many facts about our own country and our PowerPoint included information about the whole of Australia to give the Philippines an overall outlook on how we run things in Australia and what our most special landmarks are. And the Philippines case studies PowerPoint did the same thing as well which was good to see. One thing that the Philippines did that was different to us was that at the end of everyone’s turn of speaking, they would announce who was going to speak next which was a clever and effective idea in my opinion.
The students that represented Philippines in the web conference spoke quite a lot on their overuse of electricity and energy with the majority of their gas emissions being from this energy use which was at an astonishing 1.39 metric tons in 2018. Ultimately, Australia has a very similar problem as we are the world's twentieth largest consumer of energy. Furthermore, as stated above, dolomite is am extremely important issue that is occurring in Philippines, however Australia does not suffer from this problem as we do not mine it as heavily and frequently because of our knowledge of the effects that it could have on the Great Barrier Reef because there is quite a large dolomite mine situated in Queensland.
