The United Nations has designated 5 June as World Environment Day (WED) with a special emphasis on forests. The theme is ‘Forests: Nature at your service’ to highlight the environmental, economic and social roles played by the world’s forests. India is the host nation for WED 2011 and there are many events planned to raise awareness of the damage done through deforestation and of the need to manage forests in a sustainable way.
About 30% of the land on earth is covered by forests. Across the world humans are cutting down forests at an estimated rate of 13 million hectares per year - that’s over 32 million acres of trees disappearing each year. The impact of this rate of deforestation is not just habitat loss. Trees act as carbon sinks and absorb the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere. There is more carbon stored in forests than in the entire atmosphere and when trees are cut down to make way for farmland that stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The United Nations stated, in their latest assessment report, that reducing or preventing deforestation would have the largest and most immediate impact on climate change in the short term.
Forests are also the most diverse ecosystems on land, because they hold the vast majority of the world's terrestrial species and rain forests are among the oldest ecosystems on Earth. Only a fraction of known species has been examined for potential medicinal, agricultural or industrial value and many are lost to extinction before they can be investigated.
For more information on WED 2011 have a look at http://www.unep.org/wed/
Here in Ireland the Environmental Protection Agency has organized a competition on Twitter to mark WED 2011. The public are asked to follow the EPA on Twitter and, using the hashtag #WEDIreland, send a tweet advising on a positive action they can take on World Environment Day to help protect the environment. The competition is open until noon on Wednesday next 8 June and the prize for the best entry is a hotel break in one of Ireland’s Green Hotels to the value of 250 euro.
See http://www.epa.ie/news/pr/2011/name,30968,en.html for more details.
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