Earth Hour, time to stop Nature’s free fall

The world has just observed the annual ecological awareness drive to conserve energy and natural resources to save the planet. But this time the campaign had an added thrust, owing to the coronavirus.

From Singapore to Buenos Aires, cities around the world turned off their lights on Saturday to mark Earth Hour, with this year’s event highlighting the link between the destruction of nature and increasing outbreaks of diseases like COVID-19.

After starting in Asia, the call to action on climate change made its way around a planet reeling from the pandemic.

This year, organisers said they wanted to highlight the link between the destruction of the natural world and the increasing incidence of diseases – such as COVID-19 – making the leap from animals to humans.

Experts believe human activity, such as widespread deforestation, destruction of animals’ habitats and climate change, is spurring this increase, and warn more pandemics could occur if nothing is done.

“Whether it is a decline in pollinators, fewer fish in the ocean and rivers, disappearing forests or the wider loss of biodiversity, the evidence is mounting that nature is in free fall,” said Marco Lambertini, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF, which organises Earth Hour.

“And this is because of the way we live our lives and run our economies. Protecting nature is our moral responsibility but losing it also increases our vulnerability to pandemics, accelerates climate change, and threatens our food security,” he said.

A report last year says species are going extinct up to several hundred times quicker than during the last 10 million years, and half a million plants and animals currently have insufficient habitat for long-term survival. This mass extinction will have a direct impact on human life.

Earth Hour is about “more than just saving energy, it’s more like remembering our impact on the environment,” Singapore resident Ian Tan, 18, said.

But will one ecological hour have any influence? Not many think so. He says he is not convinced the event, which has been running since 2007, made much of a difference. “One hour is not enough for us to remember that climate change is actually a problem — I don’t really see (Earth Hour) as very significant,” he said.

However, coronavirus restrictions led to a record 7 per cent fall in global carbon emissions last year, but the drop will be short-lived unless efforts to phase out fossil fuel are intensified, a study by scientists in the journal Nature Climate Change said.

The study by scientists from institutions in Australia, Britain, France, Norway and the United States, confirmed preliminary estimates from May last year that global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels fell by 7 per cent, or 2.6 billion tonnes, to 34 billion tonnes.

The International Energy Agency said global CO2 emissions dropped by 5.8 per cent in 2020.

Despite this, the coronavirus remains a major hurdle to efforts to curb the impact of climate change. Last year, Sir David Attenborough said the global focus on the coronavirus remains a serious threat to concerted action to tackle the world’s spiralling environmental crises.

Earlier, in the not too distant past, if an earthquake or flood would occur in some part of the world, say Latin America or Australia, it would be brushed off as just any other incident, which would not have any influence on the areas unaffected by it. But you cannot think of this anymore.

The world has become smaller. There is something called the ripple effect. We are not operating in islands. It is high time we took strong action on climate change, lest it catch us unawares, like the coronavirus did.