Towards a cleaner, greener planet

Dwina Barbaruah

(dwinakashyap@gmail.com)

World Environment Day is celebrated annually on June 5 since 1974. The event is one of the United Nations' principal vehicles for raising awareness and action for the protection of the environment. The 2022 World Environment Day campaign #OnlyOneEarth calls for collective, transformative action on a global scale to celebrate, protect and restore our planet.

This day reminds all citizens to collectively strive for building a greener and cleaner planet vis-a-vis prime importance to protect Mother Nature, and re-orient our development models and consumerism-driven lifestyles.

It is high time we learned from our past mistakes and understood the importance of the symbiotic co-existence between man and nature. One glaring example in recent memory is how the unprecedented health crisis caused by COVID-19 pandemic-induced sweeping lockdowns brought the world to a grinding halt, reduced the pollution levels and improved the air quality, making us realize the extent to which man has disrupted the ecological balance.

Let us not forget that we are living in an interconnected world and that we cannot continue with the business-as-usual approach in the quest for development, as every action impacts the environment.

The only way forward for us is to build a sustainable planet by adopting climate-friendly policies in different sectors. According to UNDP, the greenhouse gas emissions were more than 50% higher than the levels in the 1990s. This calls for immediate action. Moreover, according to UNDP's projections, bold climate action could trigger US$ 26 trillion in economic benefits by 2030 and by focusing on sustainable energy, 18 million more jobs can be created by 2030 in the energy sector alone.

Air pollution reportedly claims seven million lives every year globally. The need of the hour is to move increasingly towards renewable energy, green building concept, clean technologies and the use of electric vehicles. In this context, the Government of Assam's decision to generate 1,000 MW of solar power is a step in the right direction.

For a cleaner and greener environment, all the communities working at the grassroots level will have to take up projects like planting saplings on a massive scale and adopting the mantra of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle to conserve natural resources for a more sustainable way of life.

In Assam, under the Phase II of the Assam Project for Forest and Biodiversity Conservation (APFBC), plantations will be raised on additional 12,000 hectares of land in priority sites.

The first phase of the project was implemented between 2012 and 2019 with support from Agence Francaise de Development (AFD) in response to the threats posed by deforestation, poaching, and overdependence of local communities on forest resources.

Besides, a Tripartite Park and Biodiversity Partnership MoU was signed between the Government of Assam, AFD and Office National des Forests International (ONFI) on May 2 this year for exchanging of expertise and sharing of knowledge between the partners on various aspects of wildlife conservation management.

Altogether 35,916 hectares are being covered by the afforestation schemes under the APFBC, Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) and the State-Owned Priority Development (SoPD) of Social Forestry. More than four crore seedlings have been distributed free of cost among the public against the target of 10 crore seedlings in mission mode under Pollution Free Assam.

Afforestation taken up under different schemes has yielded a very positive impact on the state's green cover. As per the latest India State Forest Report, 2019 published by the Forest Survey of India, Assam's green cover has extended to 221.51 sq km. All this augurs well for Assam insofar as conserving wildlife, plants and ecosystems is concerned.

The World Bank Group's Environment Strategy 2012-2022 lays out an ambitious agenda to support "green, clean, resilient" paths for developing countries, as they pursue poverty reduction and development in an increasingly fragile environment. The Environment Strategy observes that while there has been notable progress in reducing global poverty, there has been significantly less progress in managing the environment sustainably. While developing countries will still need rapid growth to reduce poverty over the next decade, the global environment has reached a critical state that could undermine livelihoods, productivity, and global stability.

Biodiversity continues to decline as a result of habitat destruction and degradation. Over the past 40 years, there have been significant declines in healthy ecosystems such as forests, mangroves, sea grass beds, coral reefs-and their flora and fauna populations. It is against this backdrop, that the ever-increasing man-elephant conflicts in Assam have to be seen. Elephant habitats have become fragmented and degraded due to human settlements, land-use change, chronic resource extraction, and fast-paced developmental activities, including the expansion of linear infrastructures such as roads and railways.

The once contiguous elephant habitats of Assam have now become diminished and fragmented leading to a greater interface between humans and elephants, giving rise to conflicts. In Assam alone, 888 people have lost their lives due to human-elephant conflicts over the last 10 years (2011-2021). During the same period, 900 elephants have also died due to various causes, including poisoning, electrocution, poaching and unknown reasons especially in Sonitpur, Udalguri and Goalpara districts - the conflict hotspots of Assam.

Forests have seen annual losses of 5.2 million hectares between 2000 and 2010 across the globe despite declines in deforestation rates and increased forest plantations. The cascading effect is that the capacity of ecosystems to provide services such as water provisioning and flood control has declined drastically. Land degradation is also worsening in the wake of deforestation and poor agricultural practices, with soil erosion, salinization, and nutrient depletion contributing to desertification. Freshwater supplies are seriously stressed, with 1.4 billion people living in river basins in which water use exceeds recharge rates. Oceans and shared seas are also under stress from climate change, overharvesting, pollution and coastal development. The decline of marine resources threatens the livelihoods of over 100 million men and women involved in fish processing.

The crying need of the hour is to help restore the world's oceans to health and optimize their contributions to economic growth and food security. We have to develop methodologies to capture and monetize carbon co-benefits, for example, through wildlife conservation programmes.

Climate change will increase the vulnerability of human and natural systems. The economic costs of climate change and variability will be enormous, making it even more challenging to address issues of poverty and environmental degradation.

'Resilient' holds the key to being in a state of preparedness for absorbing shocks and adapting effectively to climate change. In a resilient world, countries are better prepared to deal with any exigency vis-a-vis more frequent natural disasters, more volatile weather patterns, and the long-term consequences of climate change. Healthy and well-managed ecosystems are more resilient and so play a pivotal role in reducing vulnerability to climate change impacts. Climate resilience is integrated into urban planning and infrastructure development. Through effective social inclusion policies, countries and communities are better prepared to protect vulnerable groups.

The World Bank Group environment strategy seeks a development path that supports growth while focusing more on sustainability and ensuring that the environment is a key enabler for green, more inclusive growth.

While developing countries will still need rapid growth to reduce poverty over the next decade, the global environment has reached a critical state that could undermine livelihoods, productivity, and global stability.

The Environment Sustainability Index shows that the environmental performance of countries in the South Asia Region (SAR) lags behind other countries at similar per capita income levels. The poorest areas of the Region overlap with the most environmentally stressed regions, with high levels of soil erosion, highly variable rainfall, and degraded forests. Environmental health impacts are exerting a heavy toll on economies in SAR. According to World Bank estimates, environmental degradation costs between 5 and 10 per cent of GDP in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan. The largest share of these costs is associated with environmental health impacts, accounting for about 20 per cent of the total burden of disease in the Region, comparable to malnutrition. Moreover, the SAR region is expected to face increased vulnerability to extreme climatic events, including more-intense weather, floods, and drought. Climate change is also expected to reduce agricultural productivity, potentially increasing malnutrition, decreasing water availability in many areas, and affecting people's livelihoods negatively. Sea-level rise is another critical threat, particularly for coastal India, the Maldives, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

It is against this backdrop, that we have to revisit and reinvent our development and economic strategies to make our planet a cleaner and greener one in which man-animal can co-exist peacefully in the lap of Mother Nature.