Today is World Environment Day. To tell the truth, in a world confronted with such a serious existential crisis, every day should be an environment day! This year, in order to use the Day’s symbolic significance, the UN, environmentalists, concerned organisations and individuals will focus on the threat posed by plastics.
With an estimated 11 million tonnes of plastic waste seeping into water-bodies each year, and microplastics accumulating in the soil due to the use of plastics in agricultural products, the danger that Planet Earth is being choked to death by this ubiquitous scourge has become real.
While ceremonially ushering in the ‘Beat Plastic Pollution’ initiative to mobilise communities worldwide to acquaint the common man with the magnitude of the crisis and seek solutions to it, World Environment Day has brought into the spotlight the growing scientific evidence on the negative impacts of plastic pollution and sought to create a momentum to refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rethink plastics use.
The annual social and environmental cost of plastic pollution ranges between US$300 billion and US$600 billion. Such frighteningly large figures drive home the need to find original and practical solutions to tackle the problem. World Environment Day 2025 will also reinforce the global commitment made in 2022 to frame a global plastic pollution treaty, and seek to put pressure on countries that will meet again to continue negotiating that treaty.
Plastic pollution is one of those environmental concerns that can be fought, but there are too many other issues, which have become almost impossible to address.
The biggest threat, as every schoolchild knows by now, is global warming and climate change. It may be recalled that through the 2016 Paris Agreement, the international community had drawn up a roadmap whereby global warming would be confined to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures by undertaking drastic cuts in industrial emission.
Now, nine years later, because of the failure of almost every nation to stick to the roadmap, Planet Earth continues to hurtle inexorably towards an environmental apocalypse, the expert opinion being that even if we increase the rate of emission cuts, we will not be able to prevent the average temperatures from crossing 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century! No wonder that ominous indications of the coming disaster are becoming increasingly visible.
Wildfires have ravaged many regions of the world; coastal areas are witnessing typhoons, tornadoes and cyclones of greater force and damaging potential. Ice encrusted areas in the Polar Regions are shrinking in size, while glaciers are melting with astonishing rapidity. Everywhere, freak weather events are becoming “normal” rather than abnormal occurrences. World Environment Day is an apt occasion to remind ourselves about the grimness of the scenario and motivate each one of us to try and pull our beautiful planet back from the abyss.