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GS Paper III

News Excerpt:

This World Environment Day, stakeholders must urgently act to accelerate land restoration, improve drought resilience, and combat desertification.

World Environment Day 2024

• World Environment Day is celebrated annually on June 5 to pause, reflect, and take action to protect our amazing planet. 2024 will mark the 30th anniversary as per the UN Convention.
• On June 5 each year, World Environment Day (WED) is celebrated. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) founded the WED in 1972.
• Environment Day is one of the greatest global events for the environment. This day acts as a platform to bring issues to light about the ecological issues faced by our planet.
• The day likewise serves as a stage to promote ecological changes and sustainable practices.
• The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia hosted the 2024 Environment Day celebration this year, where the most important topics – drought resilience, desertification, and land restoration were discussed.

World Environment Day 2024: Theme

• This year (2024), the theme of the World Environment Day says, "Land Restoration, Desertification, and Drought Resilience."

History of the World Environment Day?

• World Environment Day was established in 1972 by the United Nations General Assembly as a platform for raising awareness of pressing environmental problems and encouraging global action.
• The first was a meeting held in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972 where it was debated and discussed. From that point forward, from 1973, and the custom has continued ahead with a similar date.

An international day’s function is raising awareness:

• One, biodiversity is unfortunately still not a popular or mainstream concept. Climate change, thanks to its tangible, clear and present danger, has a more successful public ‘career’. Climate links have bolstered biodiversity’s societal values, since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessments (2000) that emphasised ecosystem services including carbon sequestration. As a scientific concept too, biodiversity definitions keep getting updated.
• Two, the communication of biodiversity’s well-being value is in utilitarian language. The 1992 Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) emphasised biodiversity benefits and utilisation: as humanity’s medicinal raw stock at stake, or subsistence income for local livelihoods. 
• The sum of a community or society’s satisfaction has remained biodiversity advocacy’s credo. But it ignores opportunities and freedoms that incomes enable; the quantum of satisfaction trumps quality of life.

Mainstreaming biodiversity:

• Biodiversity refers to the variability among terrestrial, marine and aquatic organisms, the diversity within and between them, and ecosystems. 
• Despite referring to things concrete, like species and ecosystems, biodiversity is abstract. In both expert and lay minds, there is disagreement and difficulty in what this translates into. 
• An “unapologetically“ scientific term, it has not achieved scientific “parsimony”, a problem-solving principle that assumes that the most acceptable occurrence or event is the simplest, making it even “indefinable“ at times.

Biodiversity and well-being:

• Localising a global problem like biodiversity loss helps gauge and convey worries and workarounds. Climate change perception research signals such possibilities.
• For instance, the ‘seeing is believing’ and ‘psychological distance’ principles condition people’s climate change perceptions. 
• Experience trumps statistical facts in acknowledging climate change while proximity— in time and space —reduces abstraction and enhances concern levels. Also, people are more forthcoming to questions of ‘local warming’ events, rather than global warming. They respond when researchers substitute abstract statistics with accessible attributes, both semantic and experiential. Biodiversity advocates can communicate its significance with appropriate examples.
• Mainstreaming biodiversity in policies and practices of government bureaucracies and businesses remains a task since these institutions continue to be mostly occupied with meeting revenue, expenditure or profit targets. 
• While conservation and sustainability are serious state responsibilities and mandated corporate social responsibility (CSR) sees environmental investments, the concept of biodiversity remains confined to academia, NGOs, policy actors, both national and international (the UN) and philanthropies. 
• Even in this confined space, where they evoke biodiversity in all its variability and functionality, the grasp of well-being is inadequate. 
• There is an unevenness; they describe biodiversity well, but notions of well-being are often conjecture.   
• In 2018, a National Mission on Biodiversity and Human Well-Being (NMBHWB) was approved in India, linking biodiversity to people’s economic prosperity and health.
• Two years later, in 2020, members of the Biodiversity Collaborative, a network of institutions promoting biodiversity conservation and research, tasked with developing the Preparatory Phase Project for the NMBHWB, penned a piece in the PNAS journal, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Human development language:

• Ecologists and biodiversity scientists celebrate nature’s variability, listing its beneficial services for society. Some of the functions it enables include flood regulation, carbon sequestration, pollination, and medicinal and nutritional plant provisioning. 
• But beneficiaries are ‘community’, a word used to describe a passive recipient group, serviced uniformly by a forest or river. Community becomes an amalgamation of individuals, with otherwise different capacities to access and use services, individuals with different potentials in converting an ecosystem service or natural resource into valuable life pursuits.
• Biodiversity folk need not look far for ways to understand well-being in these ways. They will find the necessary words in their own conceptual arsenal-variability (think species variety) and functioning (think leaf litter decomposition or soil stabilising).

 Conclusion:

Restoration rebuilds biodiversity in damaged ecosystems, but it's complex with specific methods and measurements. Examples include restoration approaches, principles, and step-by-step guides. Success is measured by restored area, services provided by the ecosystem, and improved livelihoods. However, these services don't guarantee well-being for everyone. Unequal access to these benefits, like using restored land for crops or education, can limit their true value.