From Bondi Junction in Australia to Bindura in Zimbabwe, millions marked World Environment Day on Sunday by planting trees, picking up litter and staging rallies aimed at making cities cleaner and greener.
SINGAPORE — From Bondi Junction in Australia to Bindura in Zimbabwe, millions marked World Environment Day on Sunday by planting trees, picking up litter and staging rallies aimed at making cities cleaner and greener.
By 2030, more than 60 percent of the world's population will live in cities, up from almost half now and just a third in 1950, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said. The growth poses huge problems, ranging from clean water supplies to trash collection.
This year's theme for World Environment Day is better "green" planning for the world's burgeoning cities, many of them blighted by air pollution, fouled rivers and poor sanitation.
"Already, one of every three urban dwellers lives in a slum," Annan said in a statement. "Let us create green cities," he said, adding that unless planning improved, the U.N. goal of halving poverty by 2015 would not be met.
Activists around the world mark June 5, the date of the first environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972, as the U.N.'s World Environment Day.
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In San Francisco, the main host of the event, mayors from more than 50 cities including Shanghai, Kabul, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Phnom Penh, Jakarta, Rome and Istanbul planned to sign up for a scheme setting new green standards for city planning. Cities would be ranked from zero to four stars according to compliance with a set of 21 targets.
In Sri Lanka, a group was to plant trees to help build up the coastline after the devastating Dec. 26 tsunami, while in Greece, the port of Zakynthos planned to ban cars and allow free public transport.
Around Australia, green groups and local councils organised festivals to promote awareness of environmental issues from recycling to tree planting to cleaning up waterways.
At Bondi Junction in Sydney, the Waverley Council's event coincides with an organic food market and demonstration of a truck running on compressed natural gas.
In Bindura, Zimbabwe, students will initiate waste minimisation scheme and a town clean-up is also planned.
India, the world's second most populous nation, is staging myriad events to promote greener cities with foundations, companies and NGOs organising anything from poetry readings to debates, tree planting to mass clean-ups.
In the Gaza Strip, a beach clean-up was also planned.
BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE
The United Nations says cities are placing a huge drain on the world's dwindling resources and time is running out to make them far more efficient and less polluting.
"The battle for sustainable development, for delivering a more environmentally stable, just and healthier world, is going to be largely won and lost in our cities," said Klaus Toepfer, head of the U.N. Environment Programme.
Managed well, cities can help protect the environment by reducing pressure on rural areas where humans can threaten the habitats of animals and plants.
In China, home to a fifth of humanity, the focus in 2005 was to curb noise pollution and clean up fouled water, air and rubbish in urban areas, Pan Yue, vice minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration, told Chinese Central Television.
About 90 percent of rivers running through Chinese cities were severely polluted, CCTV said on Sunday.
Bangladesh, a crowded nation of 144 million people, faced serious problems including rising sea levels and crippling floods, Environment and Forest Minister Tariqul Islam said.
Just as alarming, the population of Dhaka, the capital, would rise from 10 million today to 25 million in 2030 if the current trend of migration and birth rate persisted, he told a news conference on Saturday.
The mayors' meeting in San Francisco would set goals including a cut in their cities' emissions of heat-trapping gases from cars, factories and power plants by 25 percent by 2030.
That is more ambitious than under the U.N.'s Kyoto protocol, which seeks to cut emissions from developed nations by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
"Cities are prolific users of natural resources and generators of waste. They produce most of the greenhouse gases that are causing global climate change," Annan said.
Other targets for the cities will include ensuring that residents would not have to walk more than 500 metres (550 yards) in 2015 to reach public transport or an open space.
Some cities used Sunday to get tough on waste. The west Australian city of Perth announced a crackdown on litterbugs while the South Australian state government called for a national ban on plastic shopping bags by 2008.
(Reporting by Alister Doyle in Oslo, Anis Ahmed in Dhaka and Tamora Vidaillet in Beijing)
Source: Reuters
