Leonardo DiCaprio's Oscar acceptance speech and why it made sense!

Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: “Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted”

These were the closing lines spoken by Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio at his Oscar Awards acceptance speech, pointing towards the global concern of climate change.

The world is familiar with Leonardo DiCaprio's efforts and initiatives toward global warming and climate change. The award-winning actor is an active contributor in the fight against the rising concern of climate change.

In his Academy Awards acceptance speech, DiCaprio spoke about how climate change is real and took the opportunity to appeal to the world to make a collective effort to bring about change.

Before his historic win at the Oscars, DiCaprio posted a global map on climate change that shows areas highly sensitive to the phenomenon. See the image below:

Scientists introduced the Vegetation Sensitivity Index (VSI) in a paper published by Nature, that measures how sensitive a given ecosystem is to climate change.

The map is divided into three segments, wherein the green areas indicate low sensitivity to climate change, red areas indicative of high sensitivity to climate change and grey areas are either snow-covered or barren lands.

To create the map, the researchers used satellite data collected from 2000 to 2013 to look at plants on a global scale. They calculated the sensitivity index by looking at how the satellite-measured vegetation ground cover compared with three factors, air temperature, water availability, and degree of cloud cover, and how all four factors had changed over that time period. They did this for every 2-square-mile block on the Earth's land surface. Some areas, like Antarctica or the Sahara desert, were classed as barren or ice-covered, but the rest of the land was graded from most to least sensitive to the effects of changes in climate over the past 14 years.

See Leonardo DiCaprio's post below:

Posted by Leonardo DiCaprio on Thursday, 25 February 2016