Environmental crises a serious threat (High time to think)
Posted on January 23, 2008
On December 15, 1972, the United Nations General Assembly designated June 5 as World Environment Day, to deepen public awareness of the need to preserve the environment. That date was chosen because it was the opening day of the United Nations conference on the human environment that led to the establishment of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Since then each year, the main international celebrations take place in a different location with a specific theme. This year the main site for this event was Beirut (Lebanon) and this year’s theme is “Water- two billion people are dying for it”. 5th June 2003 is the 30th World Environment Day to be celebrated.
This is the first time in the history that World Environment Day celebrations are being held in an Arab country. The theme for this year calls on each of us to help safeguard the most precious source of life on our planet. The theme of this year has been chosen to support the United Nations international year (2003) of fresh water.
The purpose of World Environment Day is to give a human face to environmental issues and to empower people to become active agents of sustainable and equitable development. It is one of the principal vehicles through which the United Nations stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and enhances political attention and action.
The environmental problems faced by the world today are painfully familiar. Rather these are getting worse day by day. Despite the Earth Summit, and despite success stories like the Montreal Protocol to protect the Ozone Layer, human beings continue to plunder the global environment. We are failing to protect resources and ecosystems. We are failing to invest enough in alternative technologies for betterment of environment.
Understanding of the environmental challenges we face is alarmingly low. It is imperative that environmental issues must be fundamentally repositioned in the policy-making arena. The environment must become better-integrated into mainstream economic policy of every country. The Governments must not only create environmental agreements, they must strictly enforce them as well.
Our environment continues to face serious environmental degradation making situations unbearable to live in. Man is armed with both weapons of destruction and also those of construction and development. Unknowingly, man’s weapons of reconstruction and development have negative consequential results affecting us in different ways. A refinery is producing fuel for all our needs but the same refinery is polluting our atmosphere, as well, making habitation unbearable. Vehicles carry us to any destination but same vehicles fill our atmosphere with carbon monoxide, which can equally kill us.
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