Wednesday, 23 April 2014 00:00
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The first Earth Day was in 1970. It was created in the US to increase public awareness of environmental problems. Now, it’s celebrated every year by more than a billion people in 180 nations. Earth Day is credited with starting the environmental movement in the US and has helped sustainability become the core of development.
So dire is the problem that a 2013 report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded with 95% certainty that people are to blame for at least half the climate change in the last half-century. But what can be done?
Last year, Earth Day Network launched the Green Cities campaign to help cities around the world become sustainable and reduce their carbon footprints. The campaign focused on three key elements – buildings, energy, and transportation. The goal: Help cities speed up their transition to a cleaner, healthier, and an economically viable future through reform in regulation, improvements in efficiency and investments in renewable technology.
Most of the world relies on archaic electric generation structures that are inefficient and dirty. To help cities become sustainable, the current system must be redesigned, effecting a transition to renewable energy sources by implementing 21st century solutions.
Buildings account for nearly one third of all global greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions can be reduced drastically, through simple efficiency and design improvements to buildings. To realise this vision, cities must update regulations, switch to performance-based building codes, and improve financing options.
Transportation is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, three quarters of which comes directly from road vehicles. To reduce the smog caused by these emissions, steps must be taken to improve standards, increase public transportation options, invest in alternative transportation, and make cities pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly.
Colombo, which is undoubtedly Sri Lanka’s most polluted city, also needs to incorporate some of these ideas. Undoubtedly these are also great business ideas and green business has become a major industry in the world even attracting convention businesses to dedicate part of their operations to the cause.
On a larger scale, Sri Lanka is still struggling to switch to sustainable options, especially in sectors such as energy. Coal power has become more popular despite the grave environmental and social costs involved while making hydro energy more efficient has been largely ignored. Protecting forests with progressive conservation ideas has been completely lost with indigenous people being denied access while illegal timber felling has become rampant, usually with the help of political connections.
Larger conservation goals have fallen by the wayside as preservation snakes along dangerous ethnic lines as the issue of Wilpattu has shown. It is interesting that these same organisations pay scant attention to endangered species, deforestation, opaque land grabs or even the rampant smuggling of indigenous plant Walla Patta.
Absence of a practical, contemporary and effective regulation system has left much of Sri Lanka’s valuable natural resources dangerously vulnerable. At present many of the organisations entrusted with protecting the environment can do too little in the face of urbanisation and illegal trade.
World Earth Day for Sri Lankans is a time to reflect on what they stand to lose if these negatives are not reversed. It is day for asking the person in the mirror to come forward.
