By Hitesh Patel


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Climate change is the biggest threat facing our planet, our only home, and at the risk of sounding clichéd, the time for action was ‘yesterday’. Celebrated every year on April 22, Earth Day is a reminder of the catastrophe that awaits us all if we do not mend our ways. Yet, it is also an apt occasion to begin working to protect and preserve Mother Earth.


Unless we start addressing the problem immediately, climate change will have devastating effects, but what is particularly heartbreaking for me as an individual is a realisation that the young generations will have to live with those effects, and for no fault of theirs. They will pay for the excesses committed by us, and they will be fully justified in blaming us for global warming.


Governments must step up and start addressing the crisis now. More importantly, it will require the efforts of the governments and every single one of us to save not the earth but ourselves and our loved ones.


Some people ask me how they contribute to saving the earth? My reply is that there are many ways of doing so. For instance, grow more trees, use less plastic, recycle and reuse water, conserve electricity, use renewable energy, use public transport, etc. These are things many of us are already doing. The key is to make it a way of life and contribute to making the world a better place.


One of the biggest causes of global warming is pollution, be it air pollution due to lakhs of factories and vehicles releasing crores of tonnes of carbon and other dangerous gases or water pollution due to the discharge of industrial and residential waste into water bodies. Is it possible to stop pollution? No, but pollution can be reduced or minimised.


While modern technologies offer the solutions to global warming, the same technologies are also at the core of the environmental problems for their role in waste products, consumption of resources, and carbon emissions. Technology only for the good of the ecology should be the global mantra.


The theme of Earth Day 2022 is “Invest in our Planet”, and truly it will take nothing short of collective action by every country to save our beautiful planet. 


History is replete with the impossible being achieved when people came together and concentrated their energies on the same goal. There cannot be any bigger target or task when the very existence of our planet is at stake. We need to come together and take up this challenge together for our very own sake. We must come together and focus on how we can contribute to addressing the climate crisis. And there is simply no option but to begin now, and we can slowly see the difference!


(The author, Hitesh Patel, is a well-known business coach, successful entrepreneur, and educationist from Surat.)


 


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