World Environment Day; Its importance and reason to celebrate

New Delhi: World Environment Day is celebrated every year on June 5. This day is dedicated to raising awareness and taking action for the protection of our environment.

This year’s World Environment Day campaign focuses on land restoration, desertification and drought resilience under the slogan “Our land. Our future. We are #GenerationRestoration.”

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will host the 2024 World Environment Day global celebrations with a focus on land restoration, desertification and drought resilience.

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,” the United Nations official website wrote.

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.

This is why World Environment Day 2024 focuses on land restoration, halting desertification and building drought resilience under the slogan “Our land. Our future. We are GenerationR estoration.” We cannot turn back time, but we can grow forests, revive water sources, and bring back soils. We are the generation that can make peace with land.

World Environment Day 2024 also mark the 30th anniversary of the 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.

In a message, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, ” This World Environment Day, we are asking everyone to join the global movement to restore our lands, to build drought resilience and to combat desertification. Because land degradation and desertification affect over three billion people. bFreshwater ecosystems are also degraded, making it harder to grow crops and to raise livestock”.

History of World Environment Day

The United Nations General Assembly declared June 5 as World Environment Day during the Stockholm Conference in 1972. It was the first world conference to make environmental protection a major issue.

The UNEP was established in the same year. World Environment Day was celebrated for the first time in 1973. The first World Environment Day was celebrated in 1973 under the theme ‘Only One Earth’.