GREAT BAY, Sint Maarten (DCOMM) – Wednesday, June 5 marked World Environment Day. The theme for 2024 is: “Our Land. Our future.”
World Environment Day 2024 focused on land restoration, halting desertification and building drought resilience under the slogan “Our land. Our future. We are #GenerationRestoration.” We cannot turn back time, but we can grow forests, revive water sources, and bring back soil. We are the generation that can make peace with land.
According to the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), Caribbean small island developing states face a unique vulnerability to the effects of climate change, namely high temperatures, droughts, rising sea levels, flooding and more intense and frequent storms.
“These effects cause detrimental challenges for crucial industries, infrastructure, the region’s ecosystems and unique biodiversity and communities. Highly dependent industries such as tourism and agriculture are already seeing worrying trends associated with climate change such as food insecurity and loss or deterioration of ecosystems and natural attractions.
“Coupled with the impact of climate change, non-climatic or human activities further propel the prevalence of land degradation, water stress and threaten sustainable land management efforts,” CARPHA pointed out.
2024 will mark the 30th anniversary of the United Nations (UN) Convention to Combat Desertification. The sixteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 16) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) will be held in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, from 2 to 13 December 2024.
Collective Preventive Services (CPS) department in the Ministry of Public Health, Social Development and Labour, as part of its annual calendar of awareness activities, is calling on the community to join the global movement to bring about awareness to the ongoing balance among human activity, economic development and nature in the preservation of biodiversity and ecosystem sustainability.
All over the world, ecosystems are threatened. From forests and drylands to farmlands and lakes, natural spaces on which humanity’s existence depends are reaching a tipping point.
According to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, up to 40 per cent of the planet’s land is degraded, directly affecting half of the world’s population. The number and duration of droughts has increased by 29 per cent since 2000 – without urgent action, droughts may affect over three-quarters of the world’s population by 2050.
Land restoration is a key pillar of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030), a rallying call for the protection and revival of ecosystems all around the world, which is critical to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
Since 1973, World Environment Day has been used to raise awareness and generate political momentum around growing environmental concerns, such as toxic chemical pollution, desertification, and global warming.
We are #GenerationRestoration.”
