Green Week focused on biodiversity

This year’s Green Week will focus on biodiversity. The annual environmental conference and exhibition will take place in Brussels between 30 May and 2 June 2006. Part of the event is the annual Green Week School Competition, which encourages young people from all EU Member States, candidate and EFTA countries to learn about environmental issues and express themselves artistically.

Younger children can enter the competition with drawings and paintings illustrating their opinions about biodiversity while older pupils are invited to submit short digital videos on the same theme. The top three winners of each category will be invited to Brussels for the awards ceremony during Green Week. A selection of the best entries in each category will be presented at the conference. Deadline for entries is 25 March.

This sixth edition of the Green Week school competition builds on the success of past years. Last year pupils created more than 3 000 entries on the theme of climate change. This time, the school competition will focus on biodiversity: the year 2006 is of great significance since it represents the half-way mark towards the EU’s target of halting the loss of biodiversity by 2010.

Categories

The competition is open to all schools in the EU, candidate and EFTA countries. There will be two categories in the 2006 school competition:

Artwork – paintings and drawings: for individual pupils aged 5-10
Digital videos: for teams of up to four students aged 11-16.
Entries and Judging
Entries may only be submitted with the support of a school. Entries must be scanned, or created digitally, and sent to the Environment Directorate-General via the entry forms on the Green Week School Competition website accessible in 20 languages:

www.greenweek2006.eun.org

Teachers are encouraged to make the competition part of the class activity and the website will offer some ideas and support. A network of expert teachers in the field of environmental education from all over Europe will assist the European Commission in carrying out the judging.