World Environment Day – 2024

Theme: Land restoration, desertification, and drought Resilience: A call to renew our commitment to ensuring a better living

The significance of advocating for land restoration, as epitomized in the theme of the year 2024 World Environment Day, is sacrosanct given the prevailing environmental menace confronting the world. This calls for land restoration as an antidote to addressing food insecurity, climate change impacts, unsustainable harvesting of wildlife resources, land degradation, conflict, and other social vices. It echoes the resolution adopted at the United Nations General Assembly in March 2019, under Resolution 73/284, proclaiming 2021–2030 as the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. This initiative aims to halt the destruction of ecosystems and restore them to achieve global goals, that are perceived to be timely and well-conceived.

Coincidentally, this movement spans a decade and concludes in 2030, aligning with the target year for achieving Sustainable Development Goals. Land constitutes a vital component of ecosystems, necessitating urgent action to garner support for the restoration. Land restoration plays a pivotal role in mitigating climate change, ensuring food security, and fostering healthy lifestyles. Healthy soils function as carbon sinks, absorbing and storing significant amounts of carbon dioxide, with nearly 80% of terrestrial ecosystem carbon stored in the soils. This explains the focus of Goal 15 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which intends to protect, restore, and promote the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, as well as sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation. It is needless to say the restoration of land involves activities aimed at cultivating land for optimal yield and satisfaction. Sustainable land management ensures that the land’s ability to provide necessary benefits for present and future generations remains uncompromised, with minimal negative impact on the environment. Land restoration significantly boosts local economies, particularly in the areas of agriculture, aquaculture, creative industry, agroforestry, and other sectors. The battle against climate change can be effectively waged by promoting afforestation via aggressive tree planting and protecting and conserving forested areas.

Desertification is a form of land degradation resulting from both human activities and natural phenomena, such as indiscriminate vegetation removal, unsustainable farming practices, urbanization, and overgrazing, to mention a few.
These factors invariably lead to the degradation of dry land ecosystems, including hyper-arid, arid semi-arid, and humid regions. Drought, characterized by prolonged periods of low rainfall resulting in a water shortage, has severe implications, including reduced crop yields, poverty, conflict, migration, unemployment, and wildfires, particularly in vulnerable areas like the Horns of Africa, including Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea, among others. There is a need for us to build resilience in our quest to tackle these environmental catastrophes.

Building Resilience
As the world grapples with the escalating threats of desertification and drought, we must adopt adaptation strategies to mitigate their impacts. Building resilience in six key areas can significantly contribute to achieving sustainable lifestyles:
1. Embracing irrigation and water conservation initiatives can help optimize water usage.
2. Supporting research into drought prediction can enable timely interventions.
3. Leveraging traditional knowledge systems can provide valuable insights into sustainable practices and the wealth of knowledge that has accumulated over the years and may be built into reliable and valid climate change interpretation.
4. Strengthening policies on water conservation can ensure effective governance.
5. Promoting environmental conservation education at the grassroots level can inspire individual actions and community engagement.
6. Enlist your interest as a member of the Environmental Conservation Organization in your community.

Wishing you a happy celebration of World Environment Day, the largest global platform for environmental outreach.

Remain green and fresh forever.

Green regards.