History has remembered that environmental suffering has started from human developmental era. It extends back to nineteenth century of industrial revolution. Environment has sacrificed a lot in terms of quality of atmosphere, pollution, escalation in temperatures, ozone depletion and eventually all the events are leading to a global problem of climate change.
COVID 19 is a pandemic that has led to quarantine millions of people, closure of factories, educational facilities and other businesses, it leads to a situation where social gatherings are no more appreciated. It has stopped human to work at the expense of environment at least for a while. This has given an ample amount of time to the nature to replenish what it has lost.
Recently it has been observed that ozone is under a healing process. Ozone is a gas surrounding the Earth and hence protecting it from the harmful UV rays coming out from Sun. Because of various anthropogenic activities, this layer has suffered and led the rays to come directly to Earth surface and has affected human beings in various ways. Human being is an inventive creature, working continuously on their wants and needs by using the resources of Earth and generating waste as a by-product. The ozone hole was first observed in 1985, after that humans has realized its importance. After that it has been in human priority to get it healed. Various course of events has passed with respect to its condition. Recently NASA has observed that ozone is again under a healing process and the main reason could be less anthropogenic activities in terms of less halo gases emissions i.e. chlorine and bromine. As per NASA this scale of Dobson unit estimates the general condition of Ozone, the level less than 220 Dobson Unit is considered as a danger to ozone layer.
As the industries are also facing lock down, and vehicular emissions including air transportation have decreased the overall pollution level of environment specifically in the countries under severity of COVID-19 including China, Italy, Spain and United States while India has also observed better air quality in the period of quarantine. As per European Space Agency, the nitrogen dioxide emissions are declining because of less human activity in Italy and china.
In a recent article published in Forbes, the writer has shown certain facts and figures on how the quarantine and lock downs are helping pollution levels to decline and save human from pollution’s side effects.
Source: Forbes link:https://bit.ly/33Ve98l
Italy is a country that is under severe effect of pandemic with exponential spread and high death toll. Italy is famous for its beautiful lakes which had become quite tainted due to tourism. It is coming back to its sparkling beauty as you can see in this video posted by Voice of America News https://youtu.be/55NOGeiKX2g. All the replenishment of nature is generally associated with less human interaction with environment. We cannot neglect this idea that human is continuously affecting environment in depraved way. But true environmentalism does not forbid human to interact with nature, it says to utilize its resources without affecting its reproducing cycle. There are lots of projections and questions associated with this environmental change observed in past few months and it is leading us to ponder on human behavior with respect to environment.
Source: BBC Future link: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200326-covid-19-the-impact-of-coronavirus-on-the-environment
Related Article: Earth is Healing During COVID-19
COVID-19 is not good news for the whole humanity but it is giving us a strong message that sustainability in development is necessary to keep on human survival. Otherwise, nature will use its ways to replenish its resources and those ways may or may not go in favor of humans.
by: Kainat Rao
Tags: COVID-19 and its impact on environment
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