The foods we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the climate that makes our planet habitable all come from Nature. Yet, these are exceptional times in which nature is sending us a message : to care for ourselves we must care for nature. It is time to wake up, to take notice, to raise our voices. It is time to build back better for people and planet.This World Environment Day, it is time for Nature. - UN
Since 1974, World Environment Day has been celebrated every year on 5th June, encouraging world-wide awareness and protection of the environment, engaging governments, businesses, celebrities and citizens to focus their efforts on a pressing environmental issue. The theme for World Environment Day 2020 is biodiversity – a concern that is both urgent and existential, with a focus on its role in providing the essential infrastructure that supports life on Earth and human development.
Biodiversity is the foundation that supports all life on land and water. It affects every aspect of human life providing us food, air, water, medicine sources, natural disease resistance, climate mitigation system and even jobs. Human actions, including deforestation, encroachment on wild life habitats, intensified agriculture have pushed nature beyond its limits.
A study by the World Wildlife Fund, 2016 states that the planet has lost 58% of its biodiversity since 1970. According to a 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by IPBES, 25% of plant and animal species are threatened with extinction as the result of human activity. Almost all scientists acknowledge that the rate of species loss is greater now than ever in human history. If we continue on this path of biodiversity loss, we are only heading towards a future with severe implications on humanity along with the collapse of food and health system.
Despite all the benefits and the unconditional supplies nature has given all through the generations of human existence we choose to remain arrogant and indifferent and ungrateful, maintaining instead our actions of constant destruction of the nature that we live in, the nature that we need more than it needs us. It is time that we rise up, wake up from our slumber to take notice to recognize and regard its importance before it’s too late.
Some call her Nature and others call her Mother Nature, she’s been here for over 4 and half billion years, 22 thousand and 500 hundred times longer than humans. Mother Nature doesn’t need people but yes we need her more than ever before and our future depends on her. We must know that when Nature thrives we thrive, when Nature falters we falter or even worse. She has been here for eons, she has fed species greater than us and starved species greater than us. Her oceans, her soil, her flowing streams, her forests, they all can take us or leave us. How we chose to live each day, whether we regard or disregard Mother Nature, it doesn’t matter to her one way or the other. But our actions will determine our fate and our future not hers. She’s been here, and she will continue to exist. Nature will go on. She is prepared to evolve, are we ? (Conservation International)