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THE ALLEYNIAN 709
OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
Alexander Poli (Year 10) laments the environmental destruction that even Covid cannot prevent Wishful thinking
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Illegal loggers, miners and ranchers havemet with faint resistance from the authorities
ARTWORK — ALEXANDROS DOUROUKLAKIS (YEAR 13)
The disastrous effects of climate change are now impossible to ignore. Carbon dioxide levels in the air are the highest they have been for 650,000 years, at 415 parts per million. Minimum levels of Arctic ice have dropped by 13.1% per decade, and ice sheets are losing 428 billion metric tons of mass per year, according to NASA satellite imagery. The global temperature has risen by 2°, meaning that 19 of the 20 warmest years on record occurred after 2001. The global sea level has risen by nearly 178mm over the past 100 years. In 2019, more than 1.4 million schoolchildren, headed by the 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, took to the streets to deliver to their respective governments an unmistakable message: they would no longer stand by as their world was destroyed. And then, in September 2019, Australia was set ablaze. Hundreds of unusually intense wildfires burned, mainly in the southeast of the country. It was estimated, as of 9 March 2020, that 18.6 million hectares of land were burned, 5,900 buildings were destroyed and at least 34 people were killed. And that was only the impact on humans. Nearly 3 billion terrestrial vertebrates were affected by the fire, and it is believed that some endangered species became extinct. However, the shadows that these catastrophes have cast across the world were dwarfed by the greatest challenge many of us have ever personally faced: the Covid-19 pandemic. We have all seen and experienced first-hand the catastrophic chaos caused by the virus, with, at the time of writing, 85.6 million cases and 1.85 million deaths worldwide, and damage to the economy that will continue to haunt the world when I am an adult. We are all aware of Covid’s incredibly detrimental effects upon humanity, but what some people might not have thought about are the effects on the environment, both positive and negative. It was observed, when Italy went into total lockdown, that wildlife greatly increased: fish, cormorants and swans were seen in the canals of Venice; dolphins were sighted near the Port of Cagliari, where fewer ships were docking; ducks were observed alighting in
fountains in Rome in the absence of coin-hurling tourists; and, amazingly, wild boars were spotted roaming the streets of Sassari, the second largest city in Sardinia, with a population of 127,525. Lockdown has not only helped wildlife, but the quality of air, too, with the Himalayas becoming visible in northern India, and nitrogen dioxide decreasing by 31% in the streets of London, to name a few effects. However, these changes, while uplifting, are only temporary, and evidence points to worrying effects on the environment caused by the Covid pandemic. In early April of 2020, carbon emissions worldwide had decreased by 17% proportional to the year before. By 11 June, however, they were only about 5% lower than the same time a year previously. In China, one of the first countries to reopen, factories pushed to make up for lost time, and started churning out pollution at or above the level it had reached before
the pandemic. A new group of coal-fired power plants are being created in China to fuel the economy, which spells worrying results for the climate. In other countries, fossil fuel companies are asking for support from their governments, which they are often receiving. The pandemic seems to be bolstering, rather than crippling them, in some cases. In the Brazilian Amazon, 64% more land was cleared in April 2020 than April 2019, and illegal loggers, miners and ranchers have met with faint resistance from the authorities, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has advocated even more exploitation of the Amazon. While it was pleasant to think that the climate had been given a chance to recover due to the Covid pandemic, that is largely wishful thinking. Unless we give our all to protect the environment, the world that we hold so dear will slip through our hands like sand from a lifeless ocean.
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