Tomorrow is World Environment Day, WED. Also known as International Eco Day, it is commemorated each year on June 5. It is one of the principal vehicles through which the United Nations (UN) stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and enhances political attention and action.
Since it began in 1972, global citizens have organised many thousands of events, from neighbourhood clean-ups, to action against wildlife crime, to replanting forests.
The aim of WED is to encourage people to become active supporters of sustainable and equitable living, to promote awareness and have an understanding that communities play a central role in changing attitudes towards environmental issues. It also exhorts us to develop partnerships that will ensure all nations and people enjoy a safer and more fulfilling future.
World Environment Day is organized around a theme that focuses attention on a particularly pressing environmental concern. The theme for 2018 is ‘Beating plastic pollution’, which is a call to action for all of us to come together to combat one of the great environmental challenges of our time.
Chosen by this year’s host, India, the theme of WED 2018 invites us all to consider how we can make changes in our everyday lives to reduce the heavy burden of plastic pollution on our natural places, our wildlife, our oceans and waterways – and our own health.
While plastic has many valuable uses, we have become over reliant on single-use or disposable plastic – with severe environmental consequences. Around the world, some one million plastic drinking bottles are purchased every minute. Every year we use up to 5 trillion disposable plastic bags. In total, 50 per cent of the plastic we use is single use.
Nearly one third of the plastic packaging we use escapes collection systems, which means that it ends up clogging our city streets and polluting our natural environment. Every year, up some 13 million tons of plastic leak into our oceans, where it smothers coral reefs and threatens vulnerable marine wildlife. The plastic that ends up in the oceans can circle the Earth four times in a single year, and it can persist for up to 1,000 years before it fully disintegrates.
Plastic also makes its way into our water supply – and thus into our bodies. What harm does that cause? Scientists still aren’t sure, but plastics contain a number of chemicals, many of which are toxic or disrupt hormones. Plastics can also serve as a magnet for other pollutants, including dioxins, metals and pesticides.
This observance also provides an opportunity to sign or ratify international environmental conventions. In 2016, the day was dedicated to the prevention of illegal trade in wildlife commemorated under the theme ‘Go wild for life!’ The topic covered a diversity of areas including animals and plants that are threatened with extinction within your local area as well.
Several agencies have decided to focus on biodiversity, taking into consideration the rate of extinction of wildlife and plants. It’s frightening but true: Our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals — the sixth wave of extinctions in the past half-billion years.
We are currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural ‘background’ rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we’re now losing species at 1000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day. It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century.
Unlike past mass extinctions, caused by events like asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, and natural climate shifts, the current crisis is almost entirely caused by us – humans. In fact, 99 percent of currently threatened species are at risk from human activities, primarily those driving habitat loss, introduction of exotic species, and global warming.
Because the rate of change in our biosphere is increasing, and because every species’ extinction potentially leads to the extinction of others bound to that species in a complex ecological web, numbers of extinctions are likely to snowball in the coming decades as ecosystems unravel.
In Sri Lanka, for instance researchers believe poaching has helped reduce our elephant and leopard populations by up to 75 percent over the last century. While firm numbers are scarce, biologists estimate that less than 500 of the big cats remain in the island nation. Unfortunately, Asian elephants face massive threats from poaching, habitat loss and human-elephant conflict. Tens of thousands of African elephants die every year at the hands of criminals out for their tusks. A global treaty made trading in ivory illegal in 1989, but the illegal international trade in ivory has skyrocketed in the past 10 years, fuelled by demand from a growing middle class in Asia.
Dangerous international crime syndicates are often behind the trafficking of ivory and other illegal wildlife products, weakening governments and using corruption and coercion to move their goods.
Meanwhile, Asian elephants, also vulnerable to poaching at a smaller scale, struggle with shrinking habitat. This forces elephants into close quarters with humans—often raiding crops and sometimes injuring people, which leaves them vulnerable to retaliatory killings.
Import, export, re-export and introduction from the sea of species of flora and fauna should be made on the basis of special permits and certificates. Despite the many laws in force for their protection leopards are in trouble. The big spotted cats have been hunted to extinction in some areas, and their habitat is under pressure from growing human populations.
But while parks and preserves have helped save leopard and elephant habitat, the cat’s striking pelt and the pachyderm’s valuable ivory continue to make them attractive targets for poachers. While not as fashionable as they once were, a leopard fur can still fetch thousands of dollars on the black market.Species diversity ensures ecosystem resilience, giving ecological communities the scope they need to withstand stress.
Since 1973 the annual event on June 5 is marked by campaigns in order to raise global awareness about the importance of the healthy and green environment in human lives, to solve the environmental issues by implementing some positive environmental actions as well as to make aware that everyone is responsible for saving the environment.
Wild life lovers hope to prevent such ecological catastrophes by learning more about leopard and elephant habits and answering key questions, such as how much territory the majestic pachyderms and big cats need to survive. And, eventually, they hope that people will see that a leopard’s skin or a pair of ivory tusks are more valuable on a living animal than they are as ornaments or in their living rooms.
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Floods, landslides a result of reckless devastation
Monsoon rains have caused flooding across much of Sri Lanka, leading to the deaths of at least 25 people and displacement of more than 400,000 others.
A number of major rivers burst their banks affecting more than 120,000 people in half of the country’s 25 districts. The military has been deployed to help.
Last year as well the country experienced the worst flooding in 14 years and the bad weather killed at least 194 people. The monsoon rains were the worst to hit Sri Lanka since 2003. They came after two months of drought, which had grown severe enough to warrant aid from the World Food Programme.
For thousands of Sri Lankans fleeing the floods in many cases everything has been lost. Conservationists have placed the blame on the nation’s recurrent flood disasters to the failure of successive administrations to adequately address environmental concerns.
Over the years our forests, mangroves, wilderness, wetlands and rivers have been irretrievably destroyed. In some instances the destruction is attributed to accommodate population pressures and development. But in many cases the reason behind such reckless devastation is solely greed. This is sinful depredation of some of our most valued natural resources.
In reality, diversified ecosystems protect watersheds, local rainfall, food supply and sustaining soil. Equally importantly, our jungles, rainforests and wetlands are also a bulwark against global warming. One cannot simply fill them up, chop them down or obliterate such natural systems without running dangerous climatic risks.
Conservationists have been placing the blame squarely on extensive deforestation and the filling of thousands of acres of wetlands for our strangely altering climate that has more recently been manifesting itself in the form of droughts, flash floods, landslides and soil erosion. The result has been causing human and economic suffering on a colossal dimension. Once fashioned such misery is not easy to alleviate.
Ours has been a nation where forestry has gone mad, where our invaluable wetlands and mangroves are being treated as worthless marshland and are being filled willy-nilly for new construction development and housing. Besides, wildlife, bird and marine habitats that sustain such unique species, once destroyed can never be replaced.
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