Visits

The young participants visited their twintowns in Iceland in April 2003.

The local divisions of the Nordic Association had along with the local governments arranged a program connected with Local Agenda 21 for them. The youths that were invited were at the ages of 15 -18 years old and came from their twintowns in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. From 1st -5th of April they worked together in groups consisting of 4-8 at practical programs in the Icelandic communities of Arborg, Gardabaer, Harfnarfjordur, Akranes, Akureyri and Mosfellsbaer.

Local Agenda 21 is the action plan for a sustainable development of a municipality, set up by local authority together with the local stakeholders and citizens. That means that that all the people within the local communities take part in deciding and implementing a plan about how to get what they want from the environment and yet be able to leave the earth in a similar condition for later generations.

The projects in the six communities were diverse as each of them has their own environmental plan. Visitors to Akranes visited the school and sports hall and worked with green accounting. The project in Akureyri was to learn about recycling by visiting the recycling plant and institutions and by recycling paper. In Arborg they both visited Selfoss Energy plant and a local nursery school as well as writing an essay on Local Agenda 21 with help of the Internet. In Gardabaer there were visits to a horse rental and the recycling centre, as well as presentation of the construction plan in the lavafield and a study on the lake of Vifilsstadir. In Hafnarfjordur the participants laid nature turf and the theme in Mosfellsbaer was the river Varma. Its pollution levels were taken and scrap was gathered to build a statue. The participants in Hafnarfjordur, Gardabaer and Mosfellsbaer worked together at certain parts of the program.

The participants were positive in evaluation of the visits. The host families were very popular and although some aspects of the programs didn't escape criticism, mainly that in some cases they focused a little too much on the local culture and not environment, the overall evaluation was that they were quite interesting and educational.