World Environment Day

On 15th December 1977, the United Nations (UN) established that every 5th June would be commemorated as World Environment Day.

With this celebration, the UN aims to raise awareness and educate the world’s population and governments on a variety of environment-related issues. The main objectives are to encourage people to play an active role in sustainable and equitable development, to promote the important role of communities in changing attitudes towards environmental issues, and to foster cooperation for a sustainable environment to ensure that all countries and people enjoy a more prosperous and secure future. In fact, the United Nations considers this day as one of the most important, since through actions it tries to raise awareness and implement global action in favour of caring for the environment.

Since then, World Environment Day has been celebrated in different countries with multiple activities such as street rallies demanding greater control and care for the environment, recycling and cleaning campaigns, eco-concerts, large posters in schools and colleges, tree planting, etc. In addition, the media highlight the importance of caring for the environment and many countries take the opportunity to sign and ratify international conventions for nature conservation.

Each year the commemoration has a host country and a central theme. This year, the host country is Pakistan and the theme is Ecosystem Restoration (preventing, halting and reversing the degradation of ecosystems worldwide). In this way, the aim is to raise awareness among the world’s population about the need to recover those ecosystems that have been degraded or destroyed, as well as to conserve those that are still intact. Undoubtedly, healthier ecosystems support biodiversity conservation and provide further benefits in fertile soils, resource availability and greenhouse gas reserves.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, ecosystem restoration can take many forms, from planting new trees on degraded sites to trying to remove the pressures on nature to allow it to recover on its own. The UN recognises the difficulty of carrying out these policies because returning an ecosystem to its original state is an arduous task. Human needs for arable land or the development of new infrastructures in places that used to be forests prevent certain soils from returning to their natural state. Likewise, we cannot forget the constant evolution of the climate, which forces both ecosystems and societies to continuously adapt.

Despite the poor environmental state of the planet, especially in certain highly polluted areas, the UN believes that it is possible to restore all types of ecosystems, for example, forests, agricultural land, wetlands, cities, oceans, etc. The collaboration of organisations and individuals is essential for this, from governments and companies to communities and individuals. On the other hand, environmental degradation often has many and varied causes and is of very different scales.

The United Nations says that restoring 350 million hectares of degraded terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems by 2030 could generate around $9 trillion in ecosystem services. In addition, this restoration could remove between 13 and 26 gigatons (one gigatonne equals one billion metric tons) of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. From an economic point of view, these actions are easy to calculate. Additionally, according to the UN, the economic benefits exceed ten times the cost of investment, while the price of doing nothing is at least three times that of ecosystem restoration.

But it is not just about economics – restoring ecosystems protects and improves the livelihoods of the people who depend on them, helps control disease and reduces the risk of natural disasters, as well as helping to achieve the goals of sustainable development strategies.