Dr Siba Sankar Sahu
The theme for World Environment Day 2021 is “Ecosystem Restoration” and it has been declared as the “UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration”. There has never been a more urgent need to revive damaged ecosystems than now. The Convention on Biological Diversity (2016) aims at “restoration of degraded natural and semi-natural ecosystems, including urban environments. Ecosystem restoration means the process of assisting the recovery of ecosystems that have been degraded, damaged or destroyed, as well as conserving the ecosystems that are still intact. The objective is to revive degraded ecosystem to its historic course, not its historic shape and to make a healthier ecosystem with rich biodiversity. The UN Decade is building a strong, broad-based global movement to ramp up restoration and sustainable future. The aim is to achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 through ecological restoration.
Restoration can take many forms: Growing trees, greening cities, re-wilding gardens, changing diets or cleaning up rivers and coasts. This is the generation that can make peace with nature. Ecological restoration, when implemented effectively and sustainably, contributes to protecting biodiversity, improving health and wellbeing, increasing food and water security, sustainable economy and supporting climate change mitigation, resilience, and adaptation. It is a solution-based approach that engages bottom to top to repair ecological damage and rebuild a healthier human-environment linkage that needs to work at local, regional, and global level. Ecosystem services can support life through healthy ecosystem, reduce hazards and disasters, preservation of soils and renewal fertility, protection from the global warming and climate change, preservation aesthetic beauty and traditional ecological knowledge and protection of the native ecosystem.
The degraded planet Earth and its deprived people desperately call for ecological restoration. Unjust development, paradigm shift of natural and human disaster, population pressure, biodiversity loss, poverty and pollution have all brought down our mother Earth to the edge of planetary catastrophe. Around 90 billion tons of resources are extracted from the Earth every year, two third of tropical rainforest destroyed and 2.12 billion tons of waste dumped every year on the planet. In 2050, it is expected the world population will be too big to feed and by 2070 coral reefs are anticipated to be gone altogether.
A single teaspoon of rich garden soil can hold up to one billion bacteria, several yards of fungal filaments, several thousand protozoa and scores of nematodes. 95% of small insects spend their life in the top soil. All these humble creatures, living or dead, continuously add to the nutrition of the soil. In the view of Natabar Sarangi, a pioneer in organic farming, “Man has raped the earth mercilessly through industrial/commercial agriculture and now time has come to adopt organic farming for sustainable ecosystem”. According to the USA-based geologist David Montgomery, the Earth is losing 1% of its topsoil every year due to erosion, mostly due to faulty agriculture.” The United States is losing soil at a rate 10 times faster than the soil replenishment rate, while China and India are losing it 30 to 40 times faster. It is expected that by 2050, 95% of Earth’s land will be degraded. A whopping 24 billion tons of soil have already been eroded by unsustainable agricultural practice which harms the ecosystem functions.
Mangrove forests are most valuable coastal ecosystems having a great role in reducing frequency and intensity of coastal hazards like cyclone are being destroyed at an alarming rate. 50% of the world’s mangroves were destroyed just in the past half century and the trend continues. The remaining mangroves could be invisible in the next century. The increasing intensity of cyclones in Odisha may be due to excessive loss of mangrove forest and changing sea surface temperature. A mangrove in Bhitarkanika National Park stood as a protective barrier from cyclone Amphan, 1999 Super cyclone and now Yash. The mangrove is proven and time-tested natural barrier against tidal surge and cyclones in coastal Odisha. Although mangroves make up less than one percent of all tropical forests worldwide, their contribution to mitigating climate change is huge. Unfortunately, 40% of the country’s mangroves have already been converted to agricultural land or lost to urban sprawl.
UN has declared the deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals and the timeline identified by scientists is the last chance to prevent catastrophic climate change. Healthy soils, emotional connection to nature, protecting native and indigenous cultures and restoring environmental micro-biomes are four major key reasons why ecological restoration is the most vital endeavour of the contemporary world. Our fear of nature has to be replaced by love and respect. She needs us to delay her premature ageing by establishing a harmonious relationship with the Earth.
The writer is an Assistant Professor in Department of Applied Geography, School of Regional Studies and Earth Sciences at Ravenshaw University.