01 Jun 2017 News

Connect with nature! World Environment Day celebrated on 5 June 2017

The protection and improvement of the human environment is a major issue, which affects the well-being of peoples and economic development throughout the world. The annual celebration of World Environment Day on 5 June provides us with an opportunity to broaden the basis for an enlightened opinion and responsible conduct by individuals, enterprises and communities in preserving and enhancing the environment. Since its designation in 1974, World Environment Day has grown to become a global platform for public outreach that is widely celebrated all over the world.

Each year, World Environment Day is organized around a theme that focuses attention on a particularly pressing environmental concern. This year, Canada will host the official celebrations of the World Environment Day under the theme, ‘Connecting People to Nature’. This message urges us to get outdoors and into nature, to appreciate its beauty and to think about how we are part of nature and how intimately we depend on it. It challenges us to find fun and exciting ways to experience and cherish this vital relationship.

Billions of rural people around the world spend every working day ‘connected to nature’ and appreciate full well their dependence on natural water supplies and how nature provides their livelihoods in the form of fertile soil. They are among the first to suffer when ecosystems are threatened, whether by pollution, climate change or over-exploitation. Nature’s gifts are often hard to value in monetary terms. Like clean air, they are often taken for granted, at least until they become scarce. However, economists are developing ways to measure the multi-trillion-dollar worth of many so-called ‘ecosystem services’, from insects pollinating fruit trees to the leisure, health and spiritual benefits of a hike up a valley.

The Mediterranean is a large semi-enclosed sea with a coastline of 46 000 km for an area of 2.5 million km². The basin stretches more than 3 500 km east to west from the Strait of Gibraltar to the shores of Lebanon and circa 1 000 km north to south from Italy to Morocco and Libya. It is home to a population of around 465 million people of which 150 million live in its coastal areas and is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.

The Mediterranean region comprises a vast set of coastal and marine ecosystems that deliver valuable benefits to all its coastal inhabitants. These include coastal plains, wetlands, brackish water lagoons, estuaries or transitional areas, rocky shores and nearshore coastal areas, sea grass meadows, coralligenous communities, frontal systems and upwellings, seamounts, and pelagic systems. As a result, the Mediterranean has not only a very rich biodiversity but also an exceptionally high rate of endemism both on land and in the sea. It is considered one of the top biodiversity hotspots in the world.

Since 1975, the UN Environment / Mediterranean Action Plan and the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment and the Coastal Region of the Mediterranean (Barcelona Convention) and its Protocols has provided the framework for its Contracting Parties to cooperate in protecting the sea and coastal environment as well as the uses and livelihoods that they support. The Barcelona Convention provides the governance framework for setting environmental standards and targets as well as for sharing important information for management, aiming to achieve a common vision: “A healthy Mediterranean with marine and coastal ecosystems that are productive and biologically diverse for the benefit of present and future generations”.

Since the inception of the Mediterranean Action Plan, the Contracting Parties have recognized the value of engaging with civil society in fulfilling their mission of protecting the Mediterranean marine and coastal environment and promoting sustainable development in the region. A number of Non-Governmental Organizations from the region participate in MAP activities and programmes as MAP Partners or as members of the Mediterranean Commission for Sustainable Development (MCSD). These and other Environmental NGOs from all over the Mediterranean are celebrating World Environment Day through the organization of events including conferences, environmental film screenings, marches, and beach clean-ups.

Connect with nature: