“World Environment Day” is the biggest annual event for spreading awareness and encouraging people to take an action and protect the environment and takes place every 5th June. Above all, World Environment Day is the "people's day" for doing good green deeds to take care of the Earth locally, nationally or globally. It can be a solo action or involve a crowd. Everyone is free to choose.
It is an annual celebration campaign started to address the huge environmental issues like wastage and losses of food, deforestation, increasing global warming etc. It is celebrated to successfully get carbon neutrality, focusing on the forest management, reducing greenhouse effects, promoting bio-fuels production by planting on degraded lands, use of hydro-power to enhance electricity production, encourage common public to use solar water heaters, energy production through solar sources, developing new drainage systems, promoting coral reefs and mangroves restoration in order to get prevented from flooding and erosion including other ways of environmental preservation.
Each World Environment Day is organized around a theme that draws attention to a particularly pressing environmental concern. The theme for 2019 is “Air pollution”.We can't stop breathing, but we can do something about the quality of air that we breathe. Every World Environment Day has a different host country, where the official celebrations take place. The focus on the host country helps highlight the environmental challenges it faces and supports worldwide efforts to address them. This year's host is China.
Approximately 7 million people worldwide die prematurely each year from air pollution, with about 4 million of these deaths occurring in Asia-Pacific. World Environment Day 2019 urge government, industry, communities, and individuals to come together to explore renewable energy and green technologies and improve air quality in cities and regions across the world.
The facts on air pollution are: 92 per cent of people worldwide do not breathe clean air, Air pollution costs the global economy $5 trillion every year in welfare costs and Ground-level ozone pollution is expected to reduce staple crop yields by 26 per cent by 2030.
Trees are an important, cost-effective solution for reducing pollution and improving air quality. Trees help to lower air temperatures and the urban heat island effects.
On this World Environment day, 2019, I urge all to take responsibility for environmentally sustainable, socially equitable practices to reduce “Air Pollution”, the theme for World Environment day 2019, urge all to come together to explore green technologies and practices to improve air quality around us and world as a whole.
Director of Environment