Environmental Planning and Implementation - Interview with a Myanmar Delegate
IHE Delft Institute for Water Education is the largest international graduate water facility in the world and is based in Delft, the Netherlands. The institute offers MSc and PhD Programmes as well as a wide range of short courses. These intensive and highly specialized short courses are effective for early to mid-career professionals in upgrading and regenerating their knowledge and skills.
We made an interview series with IHE-Delft short course participants from Myanmar, who shared their experience with us upon their return from the 3-week course.
This month we interviewed Naw Shareen who attended the IHE Delft short course on Environmental Planning and Implementation from 22 April to 10 May 2019. She is currently working at Myanmar Koei International Company Limited as a Junior Environmental Expert. Her responsibility is preparing and reviewing Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)/ Initial Environmental Examination (IEE)/ Environmental Management Plan (EMP) reports, assessing environmental and social impacts and implementing their mitigation measures. She also has conducted public consultation meetings, environmental and social surveys by addressing both social and technical aspects of water supply projects.
As this course is on environmental planning it does not contain software training, yet it includes lectures, workshops, discussions, and field trips. Within the short course, the individual assignment and group assignments are included to examine whether the students fully understand the whole course.
There are two main types of subjects in the short course: environmental economics and environmental implementation planning. The purpose of environmental economics is to consider if environmental projects are possible based on the Cost-Benefit Analysis. Here, the meaning of the benefit concerns not only the profit in financial terms but also in environmental terms. In a case study, she learned about investments in watershed services for large cities as an assignment.
The subject of environmental implementation planning contains three types of analysis: plan analysis, policy implementation and process implementation. They provided a coursebook in order to get references for the assignments and her group assignment for plan analysis is "Analysis of National Forestry Development Plan (PNFD) 2011-2012 of Costa Rica". From this assignment, she gained an understanding of how to plan a national development from an environmental point of view. Additionally, she
At the field trip, she visited the Delfland Water Authority which is one of the twenty-one water authorities in the Netherlands. Its main tasks are the maintenance of dikes and dams, water level control and water quality control.
Thoughts and Feedbacks
One surprising lecture is the emotional control lecture. Naw Shareen shared her experience of attending the emotional control lecture that they gave this lecture with the purpose of reducing errors while multitasking.
After attending the short course, she
As a contribution to the working environment, she would like to share her knowledge and experience
"I think that people in our country should attend this short course because it can teach you how to plan and implement environmental projects from both the environmental and technical point of view," she suggested her opinion to attend the course.