Popular knowledge directs the ire of a growingly unsustainable population at those in developing countries that form a part of the global poor and are unable to understand the immediate need to adopt family planning, and rightly so. However, this is not an inherent trait of certain sections of people and sociological reasons behind large families and overpopulation must be examined. These are:

1. High infant and childhood mortality: according to UNICEF one child dies every three seconds (6,500 per day) due to malnutrition and disease. It is an insurance to have more than you may need so that some of them reach adulthood. 

2. Security in old age: the tradition in the family is that children will take care of their parents. The more children the more secure the parents, and the less the burden for each child. If there is no social welfare network, children look after their parents. 

3. Children are an economic asset in agricultural societies: They work on the land as soon as they are able. More children mean more help but more children need feeding. In MEDCs, children are dependent on their parents during their education and take longer to contribute to society. 

4. Status of women: the traditional position of women is that they are subordinate to men. In many countries, they are deprived of  any rights, like owning property, having their own career, getting an education. Instead they do most of the agricultural work and are considered worthy only for making children, and their social status depends on the number of children they produce, particularly boys. Breaking down such barriers of discrimination (social or religious), allowing girls to get an education and be capable of gaining status outside the context of bearing children has probably contributed more than anything toward the very low fertility rate in MEDCs.

5. Unavailability of contraceptives: in MEDCs this is the prime way of reducing fertility. In LEDCs, many women would like to have them but they are too poor to pay for them or they cannot get them.

Now that these issues have been addressed, methods to strike them at their roots must be designed so that society is benefitted as a whole, and the earth can free itself of the burgeoning burden of increasing population. These are:

1. Provide education in the form of basic literacy to children and adults, especially about family planning, financial safety and the population crisis.

2. Improve health by preventing the spread of diseases through simple measures of hygiene (boiling water), by improving nutrition, and by providing some simple medication and vaccines. 

3. Make contraceptives and family counselling available, especially to illiterate and underprivileged women.

4. Enhance income by small-scale projects focusing on the family level. Microlending, as in the Gramin Bank, is a practice that has had high success. Small loans are given for a peasant to buy some seed and fertilizer to grow tomatoes, for a woman to buy pans to bake bread, for a weaver to buy yarn, for an auto mechanic to get some tools. Thus, small enterprises may start that will feed the whole family (at least). Return of the loan is guaranteed through credit associations formed by the members of the community. 

5. Improve resource management. Local people may grow tree seedlings for transplanting in reforestation projects, prevent erosion through soil conservation measures. We have realized that large projects in LEDCs often do not work. Major projects like building dams for HEP or roads cost an LEDC which is then in debt (third world debt) and force the population into cash cropping (eg tobacco, oil palm). 

Thus, through a combination of welfare, education, humanity and initiative, we as a community can help earth overcome one of the biggest environmental and social crises it has ever faced.

 The National Vaccination Day, also called the National Immunization Day, is celebrated every year on March 16 to convey the importance of vaccination to the entire nation. The day was first observed in the year 1995, the year on which India started Pulse Polio Programme. This year, the National Vaccination Day is important as the country has started its biggest Covid-19 immunization programme early this year and has already crossed the 30 million mark.

According to the World Health Organization, immunization is a ‘health and development success story. It is the process through which an individual’s immune system becomes fortified against foreign harm causing agent.

The vaccines train a person’s immune system to create antibodies. The vaccines are killed or weakened form of germs like viruses or bacteria that cannot cause disease but make antibodies that will safeguard the body when an active and strong form of the disease attacks the body.

The National Vaccination day started with the aim of curbing Polio plaguing the world. The day was observed to better awareness about the disease and how it can be eradicated from the planet. About 172 million children are immunized during each National Immunization Day, said the website of the National Health Programme.

Under the Pulse Polio Programme, two drops of the oral vaccine were given to all children younger than five years of age. The programme worked effectively as on 27 March 2014, India was certified as a polio-free country along with 11 other countries of the South-East Asia Region of the World Health Organisation (WHO). These countries were Bangladesh, Bhutan, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste, and Thailand. In India, the last case of polio patients was reported on 13 January 2011. Since then, vaccine has become an important preventive mechanism for difficult diseases like Tetanus, TB, DPT, Measles, Rotavirus, Mumps, etc. and even the coronavirus.

 EF Two researchers in Canada, Rees and Wackernagel, first published a book on ecological footprints and their calculation in 1996. Since then, the concept has become widely accepted with many web site calculators designed to help you measure your footprint. EF is a model used to estimate the demands that human populations place on the environment. The measure takes into account the area of land and water required to provide all the resources needed by the population, and the assimilation of all wastes. 

Where the EF is greater than the area available to the population, this is an indication of unsustainability as the population exceeds the carrying capacity of the population. EFs may vary significantly from country to country and person to person and include aspects such as lifestyle choices (EVS), productivity of food production systems, land use and industry. In 2012 it was calculated that the EF of all people on Earth was equivalent to 1.5 Earths or 2.7 global hectares (gha) per person. So humanity would take 18 months to regenerate one year’s worth of resources that we use. 

We are in ecological overshoot and have been since the 1970s in that our annual demand on the natural world exceeds what it can supply. Some countries with the biggest ecological footprints are Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Denmark and the USA; and some countries with the smallest ecological footprints are Timor Leste, Afghanistan, Haiti, Eritrea and Bangladesh. 

A person’s personal ecological footprint is known as earthshare. A fair earthshare is the amount of land each person would get if all the ecologically productive land on the earth was divided amongst its population. On average, a Canadian’s ecological footprint is 7.8 hectares or approximately the size of 15 football fields. Only the United States and Australia have larger footprints at 10.3 and 9.0 hectares respectively. To compare, the average person in India has a footprint 010,8 hectares, China 1.6. In the United Kingdom it is 5.2, in Germany 5.3 and in Switzerland 5.1 hectares. 

In 2008, if we all shared equally, there would have been 1.8 hectares available per person or 1.3 if you do not include productive marine areas. Clearly, we are living beyond the Earth’s ability to provide for our consumption. The ecological footprint of a country depends on several factors: its population size and consumption per capita — how many people and how much land each one uses. It includes the cropland and other land that is needed to grow food, grow bionics, graze animals for meat, produce wood, dig up minerals and the area of land needed to absorb wastes, not just solid waste but waste water, sewage and carbon dioxide. 

The WWF Living Planet Report 2006 attempts to show countries as either ecological debtors or creditors. The creditors have smaller footprints than their biocapacity (living capacity or natural resources) and the debtors have larger footprints. Debtors could be harvesting resources unsustainably in their countries, importing goods or exporting wastes. There is no such thing as ‘throwing away’ on the earth. There is no ‘away’ in a closed system. This is why fair resource distribution across countries and the people within countries is so important – we need to ensure that no resources are wasted in the developed countries that can be sustainably used in other parts of the world, so as to make the world more equal and also not increase the global ecological footprint.

Vaccine passports are digital documents that are supposed to function as proof that the holder has been vaccinated against Covid-19 and is, therefore, ‘safe.’ The idea is modelled on the proof of vaccination that several countries required even before the pandemic – travelers from many African countries to the US or India are required to submit proof that they have been vaccinated against diseases such as yellow fever. Another key function that vaccine passports will perform is that of digitizing vaccination records across countries. 

Last month, Israel became the first country to introduce a certification system that allows those who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 to access certain facilities and events. Vaccination against the novel coronavirus has been considered to be the inflection point at which life would start to get back to normal. Israel’s “vaccine passport” is meant for public facilities such as restaurants, gyms, and hotels in the country — but certification of this kind has a bearing on the full resumption of international air travel as well. 

In addition to those like the ones issued by the Israeli government, several associations and non-profits have been issuing their own versions for international travel. The International Air Transport Association — the global trade body representing airlines — is developing an app called IATA Travel Pass that will provide airlines and other aviation industry stakeholders with a common platform to check for the proof of vaccination and its validity. Non-profit Commons Project has been trying out an app called CommonPass, which contains a passenger’s vaccination record. 

The primary benefit will be to the tourism and the hospitality industries, which are both seen as being at the heart of Covid-19 spread and are the worst hit by the pandemic. This includes international air travel, which suffered massively because of the outbreak. However, a major difficulty in implementation will be the lack of uniformity across jurisdictions in requirement and issuance of proofs of vaccination, and the fact that no common vaccine passport has been designed yet.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) opposed the introduction of Covid-19 vaccination proofs as a requirement for international travel, ‘given that there are still critical unknowns regarding the efficacy of vaccination in reducing transmission.’ It also said that preferential vaccination of travelers could result in inadequate supplies of vaccines for priority populations considered at high risk of severe Covid-19 disease, and that the introduction of a requirement of vaccination as a condition for travel has the potential to hinder equitable global access to a limited vaccine supply and would be unlikely to maximize the benefits of vaccination for individual societies and overall global health. In addition, several experts have raised privacy concerns as there is a possibility that the passports would be used by authorities to track the movement of their holders.

Ozone is a reactive gas mostly found in the so-called ozone layer in the lower stratosphere. The highest ozone concentrations are usually seen at altitudes between 20 and 40 km (at the poles between 15 and 20 km). But it is a very thin layer of about 1-10 ppm (parts per million) ozone. In both the formation and the destruction of ozone, UV radiation is absorbed. Under the influence of UV radiation, oxygen molecules are split into oxygen atoms. The adsorption of UV radiation by the ozone layer is crucial, for without it, life on land would be impossible. 

However, over-exposure to UV radiation will have a variety of damaging effects: Genetic mutation and subsequent effects on health, damage to living tissues, Cataract formation in eyes, skin cancers, suppression of the immune system, Damage to photosynthetic organisms, especially phytoplankton, damage to consumers of photosynthetic organisms, especially zooplankton. 

UV radiation can cause mutations — changes in a species’ DNA. This risk is especially high in Australia and New Zealand where the number of cases of skin cancer in humans has increased dramatically. People arc advised to wear clothes on the beach and to use sun blocks to protect their skin. In New Zealand the daily weather report in summer includes isolines to show burn times. 

It also causes cataracts in the lenses of eyes when the protein of the lens denatures and turns cloudy instead of dear, causing blindness if untreated. 

Since the 1950s, scientists have been measuring the amount of ozone in the stratosphere above Antarctica. They discovered what later would be called the ozone hole: the amount of ozone decreased significantly during the spring (September and October) and increased again in November. Apart from this annual ozone cycle, the scientists discovered that the ozone hole was growing. During the last 30 years, the minimum thickness of the ozone layer has reduced drastically and recovery has been taking longer. These results were later confirmed by NASA satellite data. Reductions in the amount of stratospheric ozone have been observed in other areas including the arctic region.

Ozone is depleted because of human-made substances called Ozone-depleting substances (ODS), like chlorofluorocarbons and methyl bromide in pesticides. While replacing CFCs in spray cans and as blowing agents for plastic foam is relatively easy, it is much more difficult to find a suitable refrigerant. The refrigerants used before the introduction of CFCs are not an option because of their dangerous properties. The most suitable CPC replacements are the so-called hydrochlorofluorocarbons (IICFCs). These substances are nearly as good as refrigerants as CFCs and are also non-toxic and inflammable. However, HCFCs also destroy ozone and they contribute to the greenhouse effect. Only their shorter lifetime in the atmosphere makes them less harmful to the ozone layer than CFCs. 

The Montreal Protocol was an international agreement at the UNEP deciding to regulate the use of CFCs, and it succeeded to a great degree as their usage has decreased since the late 80s, partly because it was the first universally ratified international agreement. More international cooperation to battle threats like the thinning of the ozone layer is the need of the hour.

 International women’s day is celebrated on the 8th of March all around the world, a tradition started in Soviet Russia as the soviet women gained suffrage in 1917. In some places, it is a public holiday, in some places, it is not; in some places, it is used as a day of protest and in some places, a day of celebration. Overall, it is a global celebration of women, their struggles and their contributions to the world.

This year’s UN theme for International Women’s day is ‘Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world,’ in the light of how female heads of state like Jacinda Ardern have responded to the pandemic in a way that should be inspiring for the rest of the world, proving that women are not fundamentally incompetent and in fact even serve as better leaders than men in many circumstances.

Women’s day everywhere should not serve as a day to simply contribute to appreciative gestures to women in men’s lives as the function they serve in their lives, but a day spent to also commemorate the struggles women have faced in establishing their human rights and how there is a long way to go before they achieve it. In this day and age, wherein brands have co-opted feminist messaging and boiled feminism down to taglines and discounts, it is important to realize how we need more women in leadership positions and important roles so our polity is not androcentric.

Today, we should celebrate women and their struggles and materially contribute to their liberation from their patriarchy. Women are an important element of any society, their oppression being a blemish on the world, their continual strength a source of energy for the world and justice. And that deserves to be commemorated every single day of the year.

 The Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF), in a notification of January 6, 2011, stated that it wanted to secure the livelihood of the fishing communities and other local communities living in the coastal areas, conserve and protect coastal stretches, their unique environment and marine area and promote development in a sustainable manner. 

The CRZ notification 2011 declared that the coastal stretches of the country and India’s territorial waters, excluding Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep islands, as Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) and restricted the setting up and expansion of any industry, operations or processes and manufacture or handling or storage or disposal of hazardous substances there.

It then directed the respective state governments and Union Territories to prepare Coastal Zone Management Plans (CZMP) by identifying and classifying the CRZ areas. The Goa state department of environment handed over the responsibility of preparing the CZMP to the NCSCM in 2014. The NCSCM’s draft report made public earlier this year states that the primary purpose of a CZMP is to describe proposed actions to be implemented by administrative or other public authorities and potentially by the private sector to address priority management issues in the coastal zone over a defined implementation period.

Environmentalists, local bodies and opposition parties have all voiced their opposition to the draft CZMP report. According to environmentalist and Goa Foundation director Claude Alvares, they had informed the Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority (GCZMA), that the 30-day limit for suggestions and objections to the draft was not legal, as it was contrary to the 60-day limit provided by the Environment Protection Rules, 1986. Activists also say that 254 maps that were to cover the state but certain villages and municipal areas have been missing from the maps. Locals and fishermen from South Goa villages have claimed that structures including some homes and churches have been left out of the CZMP. 

This is a serious concern because of the growing lack of democratic consultation in processes that involve changing the environment’s classification, which can have adverse consequences. The public hearing on the finalisation of the draft CZMP will be held on Sunday from 10:30 am to 5 pm in Panaji for North Goa and in Margao for South Goa. Let’s hope that a consensus favourable to both the environment and the parties involved is arrived at democratically.

The only environmental issue to have caused as much debate and discussion as climate change was probably human population growth. But that is, in some ways, clearer to deal with. We can count how many we are, more or less, and can see a direct effect of more people wanting to use more resources from a fixed stock. Climate change and global warming have become very emotive issues where national and international politics, global economics and the fate of national economies are all bound up with scientific debate about the evidence and cause and effect. Added to this are the questions of whether millions or billions will suffer, whether there wit be losers and winners if climate shifts to a new equilibrium and whether the power bases of different nations will be affected; you can begin to see what a complex issue this is. There are facts that are not in debate: 

• There is a greenhouse effect 

• GHG emissions are increasing due to human activities and are probably increasing the greenhouse effect

 • There has been a recent pattern of increased average global temperature. 

There is not total agreement about the cause of the rise in temperature our over what we should be doing about it. The vast majority of scientists working in this field accept the correlation between increased GHG emissions and increased temperature, causing climate change and different weather patterns. But there is a minority who question the cause and effect. some citing the earth’s rotational wobble, sunspot activity or that increased temperature is causing increased GHG, not the other way round. And there are climate change deniers. But all agree that the feedback mechanisms are very complex in such complex system as the Earth and that our models, though much improved, may not exactly model the climate. 

Adding the question of what should be done — prevention or cure or no action and the inertia that individuals and nation states have in managing change, you can begin to see why there is so much to discuss and how actions lag behind what we think we know. Here, according to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in their fifth assessment report in 2014:

 • Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, any of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. 

• Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years.

 • Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further [global] warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. 

• Human influence on the climate system is dear. It is extremely likely (95-100% probability) that human influence was the dominant cause of global warming between 1951-2010.

This is why we must take immediate steps to address the dilemma and counter unscientific claims that try to make climate change appear as a distant problem. Our future generations will thank us for it.