Earth Overshoot Day 2020 is Madras Day 2020: August 22

 

August 22, 2020 is both Madras Day locally and Earth Overshoot Day globally. As the coastal metropolis, Chennai formerly known as Madras celebrates its 381st birthday, the COVID19 pandemic's global lock down and quarantines has pushed the Earth Overshoot Day by 24 days to August 22nd. 

Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has exhausted nature's budget for the year. For the rest of the year, we are maintaining our ecological deficit by drawing down local resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

 The coronavirus that affects the respiratory system of living things has affected the global transportation infrastructure disrupting supply chains and reducing human consumption. At the start of the pandemic there were many stories of wildlife reclaiming urban spaces and hope of our earth's environment healing and climate stabilizing. The disruption of aviation, shipping and transport sectors had reduced the fossil fuel consumption as well as generally resource intensive products. Local suppliers and locally grown food have addressed the shortfall. 

Yet for all the disruption to our lifestyles and the economy our consumption still outstrips our planet's resources by a whole quarter. So the priority as we envision the post-COVID19 world is to be responsible and sustainable in our consumption and production (SDG12) so that we #MoveTheDate of Earth Overshoot Day to the year end. Thus we stop borrowing and living off the resources of future generations: 

https://www.facebook.com/2040Film/videos/2583969951914239

As Chennai celebrates 381 years a future as a Sustainable City, Sustainable Community (SDG11) as well as a Smart City needs to adopted. Chennai's coastal position, expansion eating into vital wetlands, and dependence on ground water we are vulnerable to the buffets of global warming, climate change and climate catastrophe. The flood-drought cycles, unbearable summers in urban heat islands, creeping salinity as well as seawater ingress are vicious byproducts locally of global over-consumption which calls for robust climate action (SDG13). Chennai's green spaces as well as incentives and interests urban and rooftop farming as well as the Tamil Nadu's wind energy harnessing successes are powerful manifestations of sustainable development.   

Hence in the quest to move the date of Earth Overshoot Day should make robust adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) by all entities from cities, institutions to nations.

Curb Soil Erosion to Curb Environmental Erosion: World Soil Day 2019

The theme for World Soil Day 2019 is "Stop soil erosion, Save our future."

This day promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has, since 2012, hoped to raise awareness about the role healthy soil plays in "sustaining healthy ecosystems and human well-being." Ensuring "Good Health and Well-Being" #SDG3 as well as life on land #SDG15 can be achieved through healthy soil that produces healthy food and healthy people. Tending the soil can improve mental health and well-being. Thus the process of ensuring soil health - organic gardening and organic farming can ensure mental health. Healthy minds are vital for people to thrive.

As the member-states of the United Nations gather in Madrid at COP25 to discuss climate change, reports submitted there indicate that land degradation is a major driver of climate change.

Now while it's important to de-carbonize our economies and "Keep Oil in the Soil and Coal in the Hole." A major way that people and policy can help curb emissions and environmental degradation is by curbing soil erosion and restoring and rejuvenating the soil. Intensive organic agriculture and mixed agriculture especially cultivation amidst man-made mixed fruit forests or rice fields that farm fresh water fish in fields can help restore soil.

These fields of trees can provide shade on a hot day, fix soil and protect it from erosion as well as fixing water and carbon. The leaves that fall from them can bring in nutrition and organic matter to improve soil. This is permaculture harnessed to horticulture and agriculture underpinned by chemical-free organic restorative and regenerative cultivation practices. Agroforestry demonstrated by young Costa Rican farmer Alexander Retana, shows that we can increase green cover and produce food comfortably.

As Vandana Siva put it in the Year of the Soil in 2015 when we saw the signing of the Paris Climate Treaty, "we are nothing without living soil. ...If we make peace with the soil we make peace between people."

As the article in the Hindu Business Line indicates

In short, deforestation, which in itself raises carbon emissions by 25 per cent, along with all human activities pursued on the land, is the real cause of climate change in the form of extreme weather conditions like intense and untimely rains, floods, soil erosion, and high temperatures. 

Our lifestyle, the food we eat and from where we source it has an impact on the life of the planet and its soil. Unsustainable agricultural practices, industrial agriculture, deforestation caused by greed for more agricultural and grazing lands (Amazon and the Equatorial Rainforest in Southeast Asia being two key examples of vital primordial forests cut down or burnt down).

Ecological farming - restorative organic farming that puts organic matter back into the soil to keep it living instead of making a zombie out of it with petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, can be the difference between life and death of the soil and of the human race.

We need to #StopSoilErosion in all its forms and unsustainable agricultural practices and unsustainable development are key reasons for dying soil.

via GIPHY

In a world where micro-hunger - the hunger for essential nutrients is as devastating to a different set of people as hunger is to the poorer populations, ensuring that the soil is healthy ensures that there is Zero Hunger #SDG2. Nutritious food can be produced through healthy and nutritious soil. Saving the soil can ensure that all the sustainable development goals are achieved. Smallholder farmers in the developing world must be engaged in preserving and restoring soil health. Making young farmers, women farmers, and small-scale farmers - usually marginalized and impoverished by industrial agriculture - should be made stakeholders who can benefit from ecological farming that restores soil health and ensures soil is safe from erosion. Organic ecological agriculture can be incorporated into climate adaptation and climate action measures that can be funded and trained by climate finance and green tech transfer.  These marginalized farmers can help #SaveOurFuture by saving the soil. Thus we can ensure social justice and climate justice by protecting soil.