World Environment Day 2020 ... under the slogan `Biodiversity`

Arab Weather - The world celebrates Friday, June 5, the World Environment Day 2020, which Colombia is hosting this year, under the slogan "Biodiversity", which is an urgent existential concern.

The United Nations, through its website, stated that recent events - whether it was fires in Brazil, the United States or Australia, locust swarms in East Africa, or disease epidemics that recently ravaged the world - demonstrated the interconnectedness and interdependence between humans and the surrounding life networks.

"Biodiversity is the foundation that supports all life on Earth and under water. It affects every aspect of human health, provides clean air and water, nutritious food, scientific understanding and sources of medicines, resistance to natural diseases, and climate change mitigation. Changing or removing one element of this network affects the entire system of life and can lead to negative consequences.

She explained that human activities significantly altered three-quarters of the Earth's surface and two-thirds of the ocean's surface. Between 2010 and 2015 alone, 32 million hectares of forest disappeared; In the past 150 years, the live coral cover has been cut in half. Snow ice melts at surprising rates as ocean acidification increases, threatening ocean productivity. Wildlife species are now disappearing tens to hundreds of times faster than in the past 10 million years. We are on the verge of mass extinction. If we continue along this path, the loss of biodiversity will have serious impacts on humankind, including the collapse of food and health systems.

The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic also underscored the fact that when we destroy biological diversity, we are destroying the system that supports human life. Today, it is estimated that about one billion cases of disease and millions of deaths occur each year due to diseases caused by coronaviruses; And that 75 percent of all infectious diseases emerging in humans are animal diseases, which means that animals are transmitted to humans.

It is noteworthy that the world celebrates World Environment Day on 5 June annually since 1974.