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| Rising global temperature has created new crises in the last half century | | |
Vijay Garg
To compensate for the damage done to the Earth’s ecosystem, developed countries are not spending as much as they have to spend and are also escaping from their responsibilities. The UNEP report underscores the fact that the gap between expected expenditure and actual expenditure is widening.
The figures released recently by experts from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) paint a frightening picture of the environmental crisis. Experts say that we have increased our needs so much that uncontrolled exploitation of the natural resources of the earth has become our compulsion. If this continues, the ecosystem will not be able to support us for long.
This warning of environmental experts has come at a time when voices are being raised all over the world to save the earth. That is why this time the central theme of World Environment Day is ‘Only One Earth’ i.e. ‘Only One Earth’. This year’s World Environment Day is hosted by Sweden. Significantly, in 1972, the first United Nations Environment Conference in Stockholm is also completing fifty years.
If seen, rising global temperature has created new crises in the last half century. Experts are repeatedly pointing to the danger that global temperatures will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius in the next two decades. To avoid this, to limit it to one and a half degrees Celsius by the end of this century, we have to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. An analysis of the Nationally Determined Contributing Factors (NDCs) currently under the Paris Agreement for the measurement of greenhouse gas emissions suggests that global temperatures could reach 2.7 °C by the end of the century if we continue to remain reckless. .
In fact, methane, an important component of natural gas, is responsible for twenty-five percent of global warming. Obviously, further delay in finding measures to prevent this will become costly. The destruction of ecosystems has affected forty percent of the world’s population. More than three billion people have been affected by it. The number of ecosystem services we lose each year is more than ten percent of the global economy’s gross output.
Reports on the environment show that one-third of the world’s agricultural land has been destroyed, while eighty-seven percent of natural wetlands have disappeared. Climate change has led to global floods, famines and extreme heatwaves that not only killed or displaced hundreds of millions of people, but also caused trillions of dollars in damages to the global economy.
Increasing air and water pollution has become a serious concern all over the world. It is estimated that seven million people die every year due to air pollution. One out of every nine deaths in the world is due to air pollution. Nine out of every ten people are forced to breathe bad air. Only seventy-seven percent of the world’s countries have legally defined air pollution.
The latest research suggests that more than three billion people in the world are facing health hazards simply because they are not aware of the quality and importance of groundwater. Experts estimate that the amount of plastic waste dumped in aquatic ecosystems will reach 307 million tonnes by 2040. The increasing plastic pollution in the oceans has caused an estimated $19 billion in damage to the tourism industry, fisheries and aquaculture globally in 2018 alone.
Unfortunately still our development process seems to ignore these crises. All the dire circumstances are pointing towards the same conclusion and that is that we have achieved our economic prosperity at the cost of destruction of environment. Destroying ecosystems have had devastating effects on women, local indigenous communities and marginalized groups. If we stop the destruction of natural ecosystems and at the same time are able to restore 15 percent of the converted land, then the risk of extinction of the species will be reduced by 60 percent.
If we have to keep the global temperature below 2 °C, provide food security to the growing population and save the species of plants and animals from extinction, then all the countries of the world have to reclaim 100 million hectares of destroyed agricultural and forest land. You should keep your promise to restore it. And a similar resolution should be made with respect to marine and coastal ecosystems.
The question of environmental protection is very complex. At the 1972 conference in Stockholm, the view was expressed that the standards of environmental monitoring and protection that seem comfortable to developed countries may be completely unsuitable for the socio-economic composition of backward countries. The principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) was propounded at the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development of the United Nations. According to this, different countries are responsible for the destruction of the environment to a different degree. They have to accept their responsibility in the context of the goals of sustainable development in the context of the pressure exerted by the developed countries on the world environment and the advanced technological and economic resources at their disposal. But till date this has not been seen to happen.
In reality, developed countries are developing themselves freely keeping in view the global agreements of environmental protection. The attitude of the developed countries has been that whatever the smooth direction of the development process was in the past, due to this, we have already reached a level of development and now we cannot go back from here. Now it is the responsibility of developing countries to curb their development process to save the earth and control climate change.
Developed countries are not spending as much as they have to compensate for the damage done to the ecosystems of the earth and are also escaping from their responsibilities. The UNEP report underscores the fact that the gap between expected expenditure and actual expenditure is widening. Developing countries cannot make their development process pollution free and environment friendly without economic and technical assistance from developed countries and international institutions.
We see that developed countries, instead of disposing of their plastic waste themselves, send it to developing countries for recycling. Once out of sight, this plastic waste does not end, but causes pollution in developing countries. If we have true faith in the concept like ‘Only One Earth’, then only we will be able to understand that pollution is happening in any country of the world, damage is being done to the environment of our earth only. However, the UNEP report repeatedly mentions that man is not separate from nature and there is no master at all. Unless he accepts this truth, there will remain an imperfection in our environmental protection efforts. |
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