It is becoming more and more evident that today’s modern consumers are disconnected from the social, economic and environmental impacts of their consumption habits. To combat this much effort has gone into developing production-oriented strategies that reduce the environmental impacts associated with the products we consume. However modern society must start to approach consumption and production as a single integrated system and develop comprehensive strategies to address the sustainability of products and services at all stages of their lifecycle. Although the fisheries industry, along with a number of other Australian industries, has started to explore some of these key issues, no research has been undertaken to look at the full picture here in Australia. Indeed nowhere is there a definitive description of the complex and interconnected issues of production, processing, transportation, distribution, marketing, and disposal across all industries and how they combine together to give us the products and services we consume each day. Instead consumers are expected to discover this multitude of industry specific information and then make the connections between the interrelated issues for themselves in order to make their wise consumer choices. This project will address Challenge 5 of the FRDC’s Strategy by investigating a range of issues associated with the production and consumption across the fisheries industry. It will also investigate the interconnection and interdependency between this industry and other major industries, so as to develop an integrated and systematic representation of the sustainability of associated products and services at all stages of their lifecycle.
Final report
After careful and thorough research, the Ollie’s Island Program is now a state of the art edu-tainment resource that delivers a wide range of information about chains of production and consumption across all industries in Australia, including the fisheries industry. It delivers this information through a highly interactivity and game-like presentation so as to bring the information to life and give users the opportunity to interact with real-life situations in a virtual environment. Research has shown that this type of multimedia resource has the potential to bring the educational experience to life and make educational messages more impactful to the end user.
The Ollie’s Island program gives users an understanding and appreciation of the resources that it takes to sustain their modern lives and thereby help them make wise consumer choices. This will not only positively impact the consumption trends within communities across Australia, it should also encourage those involved in the production of products and services at all stages of their lifecycle, to move towards more sustainable practices wherever possible.
Our goal with the Ollie’s Island community education initiative was to raise awareness of the average consumer in the benefits of sustainable products and services so as to encourage them to choose these over non-sustainable alternatives. Having secured the support of all major industries in Australia, we know that they are all committed to these principles on some level and are working hard to get their members involved in a range of programs and initiatives with this objective in mind. To this end, we would contend that all industries committed to social, economic and environmental sustainability would benefit from our initiative both in the long and short term and that this will have a lasting and positive impact across Australia.
For more information about the Ollie’s Island program go to its associated website at www.olliesworld.com/island. Here visitors will be able to get a taste of the program and see how schools and community groups are using the program in their educational activities. It also includes information about all supporting organisations, including the Fisheries Research Development Corporation, and even contains the interactive versions of the Case Studies and eBook (or encyclopaedia) from the Ollie’s Island CD ROM. Students and teachers alike have commented positively on the vast amount of information available in the program and the user-friendly nature of its delivery. Like its predecessors Ollie’s Island is set to become a standard in sustainability education in classrooms and homes across Australia.
Keywords: sustainability, interactive, production, consumption, edutainment.
