June 5 is the World Environment Day. It brings an opportunity to raise awareness and promote action on environmental issues and mitigating priorities.
Through the World Environment Day, the United Nations Environment Programme is able to personalise environmental issues and enable everyone to realize not only their responsibility, but also their power to become agents for change in support of sustainable and equitable development.
Humanity is now being forced to investigate the environmental consequences and challenges of its development actions, on a local, national and global scale. In a short span of time since the Industrial Revolution, the face of this planet has been under a process of change. The theme for 2021 is "Ecosystem Restoration" and the event is hosted by Pakistan. On the occasion, the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration will also be launched.
Ecosystems are defined as the interaction between living organisms -plants, animals, people - with their surroundings. This includes nature, but also human-made systems such as cities or farms.
We all depend upon healthy ecosystems for our survival. Global greenhouse gas emissions have grown for three consecutive years. Over 4.7 million hectares of forests – an area larger than Denmark – are lost every year. One football pitch size of forest is being lost in every three seconds. Climate disasters are on the rise as a consequence of imbalanced ecosystem. Around 70 per cent of disasters are now climate related – up from around 50 per cent two decades ago.
These disasters take a heavier human toll and come with a higher price tag. In the last decade, 2.4 billion people were affected by climate related disasters, compared to 1.7 billion in the previous decade. The cost of responding to disasters has risen tenfold between 1992 and 2008.
Destructive sudden heavy rains, intense tropical storms (like Phailin, Hudhud, Fani, Yaas etc.), repeated flooding and droughts are likely to increase. The Odisha Government has decided to include disaster and pandemic management in high school and college curriculum with the aim to build a resilient State.
Variety of activities are planned to celebrate this great event in different countries to encourage more people towards the celebration.
Various news channels take part very actively in the celebration to cover the news and distribute messages about the celebration among common public through their news publications to bring effective and positive changes towards the environment to solve all the environmental issues.
Some of the national and international level activities include street rallies, tree plantation, garbage recycling, surrounding areasclean-up, parades and so many activities in order to draw people attention towards wide range of environmental issues as well as bring difference. People of all age groups actively involve during the celebration to save their planet in original form as gifted by the nature.
Especially modern day youths hugely take part in the celebration through many activities such as clean up campaigns, art exhibitions, motivating people for tree-planting, dance activities, recycling garbage, film festivals, community events, essays writing, poster competitions, social media campaigns and a lot more. Many awareness campaigns are also run at schools, colleges and other educational institutions to motivate students towards their environmental safety. The celebrationtakes place at national and international level by organizing various activities in the public places to aware common public about the real causes of environment status degradation as well as let them know what steps should be taken to solve such environmental issues.
(Dr Senapati is Dean Science, Biju Patnaik University of Technology Professor of Chemistry, Trident Academy of Technology dr_senapati@yahoo.com)