With World Environment Day (WED) around the corner, corporates and other institutions would be looking for ways to celebrate the day. Here are a few popular events that they should stay away from if they really care about the sustainability and climate change.
1. Tree plantations
This is probably the most popular way to celebrate WED. It is a fabulous photo-op, and gives a dopamine high. But there are several reasons why it should be avoided. WED is in the first week of June, and unless the saplings are watered regularly till the monsoons strike, the effort remains tokenism. From a biodiversity standpoint, too, care should be taken to plant trees that are suitable to the location, and which support local biodiversity.
While planting a tree is better than not planting a tree, one should realise that merely planting tree doesn’t have a substantial positive impact on the environment. What more important is to preserve existing trees, and to educate people about the harm done by cutting trees, or excessive pruning.
2. Clean up drives
This is another very popular activity on WED, and groups of volunteers armed with rubber gloves and grabbing sticks descend on lakes, beaches, and public parks. to pick up trash. In popular spots like Marina Beach in Chennai, it is not unusual to find groups of employees from half a dozen institutions jostling to find a patch of beach to clean on WED. This activity, too, is largely symbolic, because by the end of the day, the patch that was cleaned up gets littered again. Also, such activities generate more trash in the form of the single use rubber gloves used by participants.
One could argue, that by participating in a clean-up, employees better understand the need to avoid and to stop using single use items which invariably end up as trash. However, for this message to be driven home, the organisers need to facilitate a proper post event debriefing session- if that is not done, there is no tangible outcome from the event.
While conducting clean ups, it is also essential to educate the participants to ensure that they do not inadvertently disrupt the ecology or livelihood (on beach clean ups, for instance, enthusiastic volunteers often disturb rocks that are used for breeding purposes, or dig up vegetables that the food vendors bury in the sand to keep them safe overnight).
3. 5k Runs to create Awareness
This is done by corporates, and by race organizers which the stated purpose of generating awareness about environmental issues. The link between the message being delivered and the activity is extremely tenuous because of which the message rarely registers. Worse, even the most mindfully organised runs generate a lot of waste in the form of water bottles, goodies bags, signage and post run breakfast. While some of these are replaced by marginally more sustainable alternatives (water from dispensers, tee-shirts made from recycled plastic bottles, bio-degradable signage, breakfast served as a buffet on biodegradable plates, etc), they still end up generating avoidable waste.
Since there is no direct link between the run and the message, does it serve any purpose conducting the event to commemorate the day?
4. Cycling events
This is increasingly gaining popularity, with the stated objective being to promote cycling as a replacement to using vehicles that burn fossil fuels. Like in the case of runs, these events too generate a lot of trash, which can at best be managed but not eliminated completely. This event, however, has the positive outcome of enabling people to rediscover the joy of cycling after many years, and might therefore get them to think about cycling more often. However, the desire to cycle to work is not sufficient in the absence of adequate cycling infrastructure.
Instead of merely organizing cycling events, corporates should focus on lobbying for cycling tracks and feeder electric bus services from metro stations, so their employees are encouraged to move away from using fossil-fuel powered vehicles.
5. Talks, photography exhibitions, nature walks, etc
Many corporates invite experts to talk about climate change, biodiversity and other environment related issues, organise photography exhibitions by wildlife photographers, or get naturalists to conduct nature walks for their employees and their families. While all of these are good things to do, in order to have a meaningful impact, care should be taken to ensure that each of these activities is directly linked to meaningful ways in which individuals can take action. Care should also be taken that the collaterals printed for these events do not generate excessive trash.
What can Corporates do instead?
While this is a long list of things that corporates and institutes should not do to celebrate World Environment Day, what is it that they can do?
A. At the individual level
Corporates can encourage their employees to adopt more sustainable habits in their daily life. They can create awareness about the carbon footprint that each of us generates, and create support groups to empower individuals to form habits that reduce their individual carbon footprints.
B. At the office level:
Corporates could reduce the carbon footprint due to commute by encouraging work-from-home and carpooling. Usage of central air-conditioning should be regulated. Video-conferencing should be used as much as possible, and travel should be discouraged unless absolutely unavoidable.
A proper inventory of corporate practices needs to be done to ensure that the office doesn’t generate more non bio-degradable trash than absolutely necessary. Since most people do not know how and where to give objects for recycling, offices can tie-up with recyclers and encourage employees to drop off recycleable objects.
C. At the corporate level
Corporates should divest from fossil fuel, and should use their corporate might to pressure other companies to divest from fossil fuels. Corporates can also donate to organisations that are working on environmental issues- while this is not as glamourous as participating in an event, it has a much greater impact.
The objective of World Environment Day is to create awareness and encourage action for the protection of the environment. Corporates and Institutions can and must go beyond token symbolism and commemorate the day in a manner that has a long term positive impact.
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