On 19 July, find out about climate change in the Arctic through the eyes of Eirliani Abdul Rahman, who trained with well-known polar guides Matty McNair and Sarah McNair-Landry on the frozen Frobisher Bay in Nunavut, Arctic Canada in March 2017 and April 2018, and recently visited Spitzbergen, arctic Norway in April 2019.
Also, hear from Woon Xin Hui, who followed Robert Swan and Barney Swan on an expedition to the Arctic last month, after being one of the winners of this year’s CDL E-Generation Challenge.
Join us as Eirliani and Woon Xin Hui share with us their personal experiences of visiting the Arctic.
We would like to thank our venue sponsor, Singapore Sustainability Academy for letting us use this space.
Feel free to bring your own food and beverage/s on the evening, and stay to mingle!
Date: 19 July (Friday)
Time: 7pm-9pm
Venue: Singapore Sustainability Academy, SEAS classroom, 180 Kitchener Rd, #06-10, Singapore 208539
RSVP: https://arctic.peatix.com/
Admission is free, contributions to our society are welcome
See you there!
About Eirliani
Eirliani is Executive Director of YAKIN (Youth, Adult survivors & Kin In Need), a not-for- profit she co-founded with Assoc Prof Daniel Fung, Chairman, Medical Board of the Singapore Institute of Mental Health to help child victims and adult survivors of child sexual abuse. She
is concurrently Program Director at the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation US.
Eirliani edited Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi’s book Will for Children, a collection of essays on child labour, published in December 2016. Her book on true accounts by survivors of child sexual abuse Survivors: Breaking the Silence on Child Sexual Abuse was published by Marshall Cavendish in November 2017. It is now in its second print run. She also contributed a case study to the medical textbook Essentials of Global Health, co-edited by Babulal Sethia, Past President and Global Health Lead of the Royal Society of Medicine, published by Elsevier in London in August 2018. She contributed a chapter to the 2018 edition of The Birthday Book, a collection of essays written by Singapore’s youngest and brightest to commemorate the nation’s national day. She writes for the Huffington Post and the India Today Group’s DailyO on the issues of child abuse and child online safety. Eirliani has also written a feature article on child sexual abuse for the Singapore Medical Association’s newsletter.
In September 2015, the #FullStop to #childsexualabuse campaign that Eirliani led on behalf of Nobel laureate Satyarthi reached 16 million people over six weeks, winning her the 2015 BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Award. Eirliani sits on Twitter’s Trust & Safety Council and on the Community Engagement Committee of the United World Colleges. She was featured in the book Majulah! 50 Years of the Malay/Muslim Community in Singapore published in 2016. Twitter named Eirliani one of 21 influencers in Singapore. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, based in London.
Eirliani was in the Singapore Foreign Service from 2005 to 2015, serving in Berlin as First Secretary (Political), and then in Delhi as Political Counsellor. From June 2015 to November 2017, she was a member of the Advisory Council of the Global Diplomacy Lab (GDL), a platform for exploring a new and more inclusive diplomacy which goes beyond traditional politics. The patron of the GDL is the German Foreign Minister. She is also an Asian Forum on Global Governance Fellow. From 2004 to 2005 while residing in Almaty, Eirliani worked closely with Harvard Business School’s Prof Michael Porter on the Kazakhstan Competitiveness Programme.
A graduate of the London School of Economics and Warwick University, Eirliani was a recipient of the British Council Pathfinder and University of Warwick Singapore scholarships. She was featured on Singapore’s National Day on 9 August 2017 by the main broadsheet The Straits Times as one of three Singaporeans who embody the adventurous spirit. An avid rock climber and mountaineer, she used to climb in the Himalayas, and now enjoys climbing in Colorado and volcanoes in Southeast Asia. She holds a Level 3 certificate in Sport Climbing (multi pitch lead climbing) and a Level 1 Abseiling certificate from the Singapore Mountaineering Federation. She speaks English, Malay and German fluently, and has rudimentary understanding of Russian, French, Arabic, Mandarin and Hindi.
About Xin Hui
Xin Hui strives to protect our natural environment and communities most vulnerable to climate change, driven by values of justice and compassion. Realising that the environment is an incredibly multi-faceted field where solutions require cooperation and systems thinking, she is heavily involved in multiple areas of environmental protection.
Her foremost passion is conservation: she worked as a primates researcher at the Jane Goodall Institute (Singapore), studying the endemic Raffles Banded Langur and Long-Tailed Macaques, and undertook her undergraduate thesis on biodiversity conservation in Singapore. To understand both the geophysical science and policy processes in climate change, she attained her degree in Geography and Political Science at NUS while working part-time on water management and policy research at the Institute of Water Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
Her strong interest in climate change led her to undertake her thesis with IPCC WG2 Lead Author Winston Chow, and she was also mentored in systems modelling by founding member of the Balaton Group, Professor John Richardson. Most recently, she headed to the Arctic on an expedition with ClimateForce 2041 to learn from a diverse and international group, gleaning insights into local environmental problems and solutions, and learning about Arctic wildlife from National Geographic naturalists onboard. She loves fieldwork and long walks in the forest, and is a football player and percussionist in her free time.
