The Utopian World Becomes NEVERGREEN

"Pray for Amazon", "Pray for Australia"--These types of posts are now trending in social media, though these remained unable to give any permanent solution. Yes, the world is burning.

Imagine a rainforest; tall trees, the lower part covered with colourful daffodils and orchids, trunks covered with lichens, is burning. The animals are running becoming homeless, ashes are dripping slowly from the dried branches, Green land is becoming dead land as there is enough source of fuel. Now how does this sound like?

A capricious number of events of fires are reported in Brazil in 2019, intensifying in August. INPE (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais), Brazil reported that the country experienced an 80% increase in the number of fires compared to that of in 2018. More than half of those cases took place in Amazon which is the largest and most biodiverse rainforest on earth. This was explicated as "Global Tragedy".

Coming to the 2nd case, our Kangaroo world has also become a sitting target of Bushfire and a severe drought crisis. Though all the states in Australia faced some extent of the crisis, Eastern and Southern coasts are mostly affected. Australia, generally possessing a natural fire season every year, faced one of it's worst and record-breaking bushfire season as it causes burning of more than 15.6 million acres.

The world lost an enormous number of animals and vegetation in these two incidents. Moreover, these didn't only kill the animals, also eradicated the habitat of the survivors leaving them susceptible. In amazon, the fire also influenced the aquatic life-changing water chemistry. Alteration of an entire ecosystem leads to an avalanching effect in the food chain. The long term effect of the fire are more calamitous as surviving in the newly transformed ecosystem would become a struggle for many species.

In both cases, local rainfall level was though unaffected, evapotranspiration process reduced due to less forest sweating leading to an increase in temperature of the environment."The lungs of the Earth" lost its capability to accord oxygen to some extent. Higher temperature escalated the severity of drought during the arid season which in turn would directly affect the plant composition. Local people dependent on small scale agriculture would face difficulty.

Forest has also become more vulnerable to fire which can cause all the remaining trees to die and can turn into low biodiversity and low carbon ecosystem. According to reports we have already reached 1% of warming globally and an extra warming of 1.5% in the parched season accomplishing a serious intimidation to the continuation of these depraved forests.

So it's the time when the world needs our empathy, not sympathy.

Author : Shreosee Ghosh