Pakistan Leads “Earth Lovers' Ribbon Campaign”

Earth Day—April 22—marks the anniversary of the birth of modern environmental movement, 1970. Earth Day 1970 gave voice to an emerging consciousness, channeling the energy of anti-war protest movement and putting environmental concerns on the front page.

The idea of this national Earth day was founded by Gaylord Nelson, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California.

Every year, Earth Day is celebrated across the world including Pakistan on 22 April to raise awareness about the environmental issues to protect earth. Unfortunately, in our country this issue is not being highlighted much and given importance to due to which the problems are increasing rapidly and threatening development and economy of the country. Pakistan is facing environmental problems like degradation of natural resources, global warming, climate change, industrial and vehicular pollution, air and water pollution, solid waste management, degradation of health and many more. These problems have given rise to poverty, pollution, and inadequate economic and resource management. Still very few people are aware of the harmful effects of pollution on their health and environment. This is not an easy task to resolve these problems, but with help of ISEC, CBN , Ferozaan Magazine and IOPGC we took a step forward to make a difference by generating awareness about environmental issues and climate change.

First time ever in history an organization has taken initiative to develop a chain of environmental and climate literacy presenters. ISEC Pakistan in collaboration with well-known organizations took an initiative under the title of “Earth Lovers Ribbon Campaign” and got positive response. Because ISEC Pakistan thought situation of environment is very critical now a days we need 365 days dedicated for earth instead of only one.

Background story behind the ELR Campaign is that in the world most of the people are unaware about the threats of degrading environment, and those who are actually aware are mostly not committed and motivated to spread the work among others because of certain reasons and barriers they face. These barriers are unavailability of a suitable platform to raise their voice, uninterested individual body, time constraint and others. ELR Campaign’s initiative is to light passion and restore confidence in earth lovers and put down these barriers so as to be more responsive to aware people all around us. ELRC is expected to be dedicated in keeping this momentum. A database system is also developed to count and give estimate ratio of the number of people who are aware and who are left to be acknowledged.