With the entire world battling the unseen enemy in the name of COVID 19, we celebrate the World Environment Day for the year 2021 today. With this year’s theme for the World Environment Day #GenerationRestoration, United Nation Environment Program (UNEP) is launching a 10-year program to push the global community to prevent, halt and reverse ecosystem degradation. The program is named as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and will aim at the recovery of ecosystems that have been degraded or destroyed, as well as conserving the ecosystems that are still intact.
“It’s easy to lose hope when we think of the sheer magnitude of the challenges we face and the avalanche of bad news that we wake up to every morning,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in a press release.
“But just as we caused the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis and the pollution crisis, we can reverse the damage that we’ve done; we can be the first generation to reimagine, to recreate and to restore nature to kickstart action for a better world.” She further added.
This year, the host country of the World Environment Day Celebration is Pakistan. Parallel to this event Pakistan is showcasing their mega scale forest restoring program named Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Project which is aimed at planting ten billion trees by the year 2023. Few days back the project reached a milestone by planting the billionth tree. The country has also launched an Ecosystem Restoration Fund to support nature-based solutions to climate change.
The Importance of Environment Restoration
The environment acts like a well-balanced equation, in which each and every part of this environment is a part of. So, disrupting any part of the environment can make this equation go off balanced. Billions of people around the world are suffering the consequences of these in the form of climate emergency, food and water insecurity, and pandemics like COVID-19.
So, it’s not too hard to imagine that only solution to these alarming conditions is to get that balance back through ecosystem restoration. Ecosystem restoration is one of the most important ways of delivering nature-based solutions for food insecurity, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and biodiversity loss.
In a recent report UNEP lists out key benefits of the Ecosystem Restoration,
- Half of the world’s GDP is dependent on nature, and every dollar invested in restoration creates up to USD 30 dollars in economic benefits.
- Restoring productive ecosystems is essential to supporting food security. Restoration through agroforestry alone has the potential to increase food security for 1.3 billion people. Restoring the populations of marine fish to deliver a maximum sustainable yield could increase fisheries production by 16.5 million tonnes, an annual value of USD 32 billion.
- Actions that prevent, halt and reverse degradation are needed if we are to keep global temperatures below 2°C. Such actions can deliver one-third of the mitigation that is needed by 2030. This could involve action to better manage some 2.5 billion hectares of forest, crop and grazing land (through restoration and avoiding degradation) and restoration of natural cover over 230 million hectares.
- Large-scale investments in dryland agriculture, mangrove protection and water management will make a vital contribution to building resilience to climate change, generating benefits around four times the original investment.
- With careful planning, restoring 15 per cent of converted lands while stopping further conversion of natural ecosystems could avoid 60 per cent of expected species extinctions.
Sri Lanka, It’s now or never to start ecosystem restoration
With the deforestation happening in an unprecedented rate, Sri Lanka as a little tropical island is currently facing an environmental catastrophe. At the same time, because of totally unexpected incidents like the Perl Express Ship disaster the situation has become worse. Because of these destruction, many unique ecosystems around the country are being threatened. So, it now or never situation for this little island to protect the ecosystems that are still intact, and to start the environment restoration to bring back the glory we had decades back.
Yesterday Minister of Environment announced a special program to mark the World Environment Day under a special theme “Protect Ecosystems”. Under this program Sri Lankans are encouraged to clean the surroundings of their home and whatsapp the pictures of their work to the ministry. And the selected projects will be awarded a monetary prize worth LKR 5000.
Ecosystem Restoration is not a responsibility of a person, an institute, a government or a single country. Every single one of has a role to play in this battle. It’s never a small task, so do your part, Start toady.
