The world is going through turbulent times with regard to climate change and its effect on humanity, plants and animals because the linkages for environmental equilibrium as ordained by God had been dismembered by excessive human activity.
Man’s excessive exploitation of water bodies and their contents, plants and animals in the forest has resulted in several phenomena such as extinction, migration, dislocation, climate-related disasters causing general impoverishment.
Every year, there are bush fires in the dry season has been of no shame to members of society. To set fire to the bush without recourse to fundamental laws and morality causes extensive environmental pollution.
This has endangered many species including human beings, the soil and its nutrients and the atmosphere and eventually distorted logical cycles and patterns for regular rainfall and natural phenomenon for normal living.
For example, the processes of photosynthesis in plants and respiration in animals which were intricately linked to the survival of man have become most unreliable in the event of bush fires because carbon dioxide released from respiration by man cannot be totally absorbed by plants for synthesising their food hence the excess left in the atmosphere to cause global or planet warming.
Today when we talk of global warming we hear of effects such as melting ice from the north and south poles, rising sea levels causing low lying oceanic nations to submerge, floods, coastal erosion, general discomfort caused by excessive heat and a barrage of many scientific and unscientific evidences.
It has been proven that the excess carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere also combines with rain to form acid which fall into the sea and rivers to endanger fishes.
According to the World Bank, “nobody is immune to climate change regardless of where they live or whether they contributed to it”. It continued that, ”In fact climate change is nothing short of a crisis of the commons and tackling it effectively will require all the ingenuity and collaborative spirit of the human race”.
Every year several campaigns are mounted to educate the public on the negative causes of bush fires but they rather recur.
Since the advent of the first Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, to be followed by the World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in South Africa in 2002 and in December last year, the conscience of humanity seems to be inert because negative tendencies towards environmental degradation are becoming rather more sustainable.
Society must be conscious that the beginning of desertification could begin from razing down forests to savannah through annual bush fires and the effect on climate change is obvious.
After the Earth Summit and subsequent ones, a commission on sustainable development has identified nine groups that could work closely to ensure that the blueprint to attain sustainable development in the 21st century is effective.
They are business and industry, children and youth, farmers, indigenous people, local authorities, non-governmental organisations, scientific and technological community, women and workers and trade unions.
Indeed if these identifiable groups are able to play their roles well, the environmental crisis that faced the world could be averted because they could even play it better under the new paradigm on Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) that aims at stabilising greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.
Under REDD+ several interventions will be carried out in forest zone countries with the view to reducing the carbon dioxide emissions from the present level of 20 per cent in support of a favourable climate change in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment