WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY 2021
ECOSYSTEM RESTORATION
Humans have been exploiting the earth for too long. Every three seconds, our planet losses a certain amount of forest to urbanisation, and over the last years, we had lost half of our wetlands. A major portion of coral reefs have already been destroyed, and there are chances that they might vanish by 2050. The global greenhouse gas emission rate is rising for three consecutive years, and the planet is facing severe climate change. The amount of global warming is also increasing day by day. And this is affecting all inhabitants of our planet — living and non-living.
We all depend on healthy ecosystems for survival. An ecosystem is defined as the interaction between living organisms like plants, animals, people, and surroundings.
With this big and challenging picture, World Environment Day focuses on ecosystem restoration, and its theme is “Reimagine. Recreate.Restore.”
The theme of 47th World Environment Day is Ecosystem Restoration, as tackling climate change and species loss is crucial to restoring ecosystems. In 1987, the UN decided to rotate the host country for the celebrations of this day. Therefore, Pakistan acted as the global host of the day in 2021 in collaboration with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
World Environment Day Celebration at We Grow Forest Foundation’s Headquarters
As a nature conserving NGO, we were very eager to celebrate World Environment Day outdoors. But unfortunately, due to restrictions imposed as part of the pandemic protocol, we were unable to carry out outdoor activities as planned earlier. So after brainstorming, our managing trustee Aparna suggested a different idea to celebrate World Environment Day on Clubhouse, the leading social media platform. This voice-based social media app has gained a lot of traction within a short period of time. The clubhouse can help develop new ideas, get information from thought leaders, interact with fascinating people worldwide, and connect with them.
The topic of our clubhouse meet was “How We Grow Forests” And through this platform, we wanted everyone to express their views and ideas on forestry and native tree planting. We started the meeting at 8.00 am and it lasted till 8.00 pm to enable newcomers to interact with other nature lovers and environmentalists. We were sceptical about this experiment as we were new to this platform. As the meeting started, there were only a few members to join us, and later, we were astonished by the responses we got. The meeting went very well, and so many people interacted with us.
Some of them shared their views on creating conservation awareness through education at the school level, climate change issues, deforestation, carbon sequestration, building sustainable green infrastructures, and we also clarified their queries and doubts regarding growing native trees on house and office premises. Around 2000 people participated during the day. Everyone was very inspired and impressed by our ideology and most of them showed interest in joining us to take over the conservation activities with us, and a good number of the attendees also took We Grow Forest Club Membership.
Since this has been an achievement for us, we are looking forward to creating similar interactions to engage with like-minded people and promote our greening efforts to a wider population. We also believe that we can spread Green Consciousness through this platform, where people can share their ideas and thoughts.
We are inviting everyone to be a part of our upcoming clubhouse activities. And we thank everyone who was present on that day and made our World Environment Day celebration a success. We are also inviting nature lovers & tree huggers to share their views, concepts, and stories of individual efforts to make this planet green. You can email us, and we will feature them in the upcoming editions.
To know more about We Grow Forest Foundation please visit our website https://wegrowforest.org/ or contact us at on 9778411911 or email at us plant@wegrowforest.org
