The one and only solution to stop the collapse of biodiversity, counteract climate change and enhance many livelihoods is through the health of nature. Our ecosystem is home to all the species of our planet. World Environment Day is an excellent day to remind ourselves about its conservation, restoration and upkeep. Let’s make our future greener by preserving nature.

Pandemic is a good time to heal nature

Since this year’s theme is 'Ecosystem Restoration', this pandemic is a good time to reverse the damage. People are mostly at home. Many activities have come to a halt bringing pollution levels down. Many damages caused by us over the years to our ecosystem are in a way getting reversed and healed since the outbreak of the coronavirus. We have been destroying plenty of forests and wetlands and building jungles of concrete. The mission of the United Nations this year is to revive billions of hectares of land. Deep water and mountains come in this plan too. 

We need to indulge in social forestry. It is a beautiful initiative by the government of India to introduce afforestation in as many areas as possible through means of agroforestry, community forestry, farm forestry and extension forestry. These methods of afforestation are easy for communities. If people are seriously interested in restoration of our ecosystem, they can do it with the help of social forestry and can see positive outcomes over the years.

Make people aware of the joys of good environment 

Since we are living and working in this digital age. Pandemic should not be an excuse to not motivate fellow human beings to celebrate this day digitally. Instead of overusing social media for personal posts, it is important to keep on posting some good pictures of nature around or pictures of any effort of social forestry that you come across in your community. At an individual level too you can plant at least some trees. Such individual, group and community efforts should be made popular so that more and more people both in urban as well as rural areas get influenced. After all, social media impacts thought processes. If we as a society are able to achieve the goal with which this year’s theme of World Environment Day is set the benefit would be all ours in the form of powerful health benefits.