International Mother Earth Day 2020. A day to raise awareness and act against the climate emergency and degradation of biodiversity

April 22 is Earth Day and to date our ecosystem has suffered massive forest fires, the highest records of high temperatures, the worst locust plague in the Horn of Africa, and the spread of COVID19, a global health pandemic.

The negative impact on ecosystems generated by actions such as climate change and environmental degradation due to the emission of greenhouse gases, deforestation, massive and intensive agricultural and livestock production, as well as the growing illegal trade of wildlife, increase the probabilities of coming into contact and transmitting infectious diseases from animals to humans (zoonotic). In this sense, the United Nations Program for the Environment (UNEP) states that a new infectious disease emerges among humans every four months and thay, out of these diseases, 75% come from animals.

In this way, the close interdependence between human, animal and environmental health is reflected. In this time of confinement of entire nations and drastic reduction of economic activity, the berets of contamination have disappeared from many of the largest cities around the world, many animals have returned to occupy spaces normally monopolized by humans. However, this positive impact on the earth is only temporary caused by fear of the spread of a virus among humans. In this line, the COVID19 crisis becomes a risk to transform into a precedent for a substantial increase in economic activity that seeks to “recover what has been lost” in the past months.

For this reason, this day serves to remind us once again that a socio-economic transformation is inescapably necessary, where harmony between human activity and the Earth prevails, our home, but no less than the home of the biodiversity that with our “economy” we are diminishing. In the face of this emergency, the UNEP climate action progress report makes it clear: “by the end of 2020, global carbon emissions must decrease 7.6% and continue to decrease at that same rate each year for the next decade so that we can keep global warming below 1.5˚C by the end of the century

During the day there will be many events on climate action. You can follow some of them live streaming  on earthday.org. You can also consult different ways to take action on this link.