Wayne Balta
How tech, & the private sector, can help heal our planet
Environmental Sustainability
Over the past year, more companies expressed their commitment to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within a specific period. The commitment to act now needs to be a key deliverable for corporate leaders
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irst, the bad news: The world has already lost 80 percent of its forests, and we’re continuing to lose them at a rate of 375 square km per day. At the current rate of deforestation, up to 10 percent of tropical forest species will become extinct every decade. We have an island floating in our oceans – the size of India, Europe, and Mexico combined – consisting primarily of discarded plastic. Those statistics come from Denmark-based environment data aggregator The World Counts. “We are using up 50 percent more natural resources than the Earth can provide,” the agency reports. “At our current population, we need 1.5 Earths, which we do not have. Up to 27 percent of our coral reefs have been destroyed. If this rate continues, the remaining 60 percent will be gone in 30 years.” That makes for grim reading on this World Environ| July 2021
ment Day. The pandemic has also added a layer of uncertainty, with millions being pushed into poverty, growing inequalities among people and countries, and scarce resources diverted to fight COVID-19. “We’re witnessing a triple environmental emergency of climate disruption, biodiversity decline, and a pollution epidemic that is cutting short some nine million lives a year,” the UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted in his video
message earlier this year. “This is a critical year for us to reset our relationship with nature. Governments and people need to understand that all environmental, social, and economic challenges are interlinked in their very DNA – and they must be tackled together.”
The two questions
Given all of this, two questions need to be asked: How can technology help alleviate some of the damage the Earth has suffered? And
