UN warns of catastrophic environmental threats

Bolivia’s natural environment is being destroyed, forests are burning, rivers and lakes are polluted, water is scarce and people in most major cities are breathing smog, while a new United Nations report warns of six catastrophic threats. These threats could disrupt vital systems on which humanity depends. life on earth. It is necessary for the central government, ministries and municipalities to recognize the seriousness of irreversible damage to the environment caused by factors such as mining that does not respect environmental standards and unreasonable burning of farmland. Currently, fires are poisoning citizens and posing serious health risks.

As the smoke blankets several towns in Bolivia, the Bolivian Pulmonary Society recommends issuing a respiratory health alert statement because of the “potential danger it poses to the entire population in the short, medium and long term.” It warns of “intolerable and dangerous levels of environmental contamination” caused by the Chaco and bushfires, as they pose a real risk to the health of the general population, particularly for patients with underlying medical conditions. In a statement, they recommended urgent personal protective measures, especially for vulnerable groups, including those with bronchial asthma, chronic bronchitis, lung cancer or those affected by coronavirus.

The Ministry of Health has also issued eleven recommendations to protect yourself from fire smoke and recommended that school activities should be conducted in a virtual format until air quality index (AQI) values ​​improve in smoke-affected areas. The Ministry of Education decided to close schools for two days. Defense Secretary Edmundo Novello ruled out declaring a national emergency. He reported that the size of Bolivia’s fires had dropped from 21 to 16 due to containment measures and rainfall, suggesting the fires would be under control by the weekend by his criteria. Doctors from the Emergency and Disaster Risk Management Department of the Ministry of Health and Sports traveled to the city of Santa Cruz and the northern region of La Paz where forest fires occurred, ABI reported. In the most polluted cities, the air quality index reaches more than 300 micrograms per cubic meter, a level considered “extremely poor.”

Regarding the UN warning, Zita Sebesvari, a member of the team of scientists who wrote the new report, said, “By destroying nature and biodiversity, and polluting the earth and space, we are dangerously heading towards multiple ‘risk inflection points’ , which could disrupt the systems on which we depend,” the analysis warned of known threats, such as unbearable heat, melting glaciers that endanger water supplies, or the loss of animal species that play a key role in ecosystems.

But it also highlights certain risks that are less often mentioned in climate discussions. One of these is the accumulation of space debris, which has the potential to cause a chain of collisions that render Earth’s orbit unusable by our satellites, many of which can warn us about climate catastrophe. Another is a threat to the insurance system. As disasters occur more frequently and prices rise, some insurance companies are even withdrawing from certain areas, putting people at greater risk. They also see the depletion of groundwater used primarily for agriculture as a risk to compensate for water shortages such as droughts.

The authors also propose a new approach to analyzing possible responses to these crises, dividing them into two categories. They are solutions designed to avoid the causes of problems and adapt to inevitable changes. For example, considering the increase in temperature, installing air conditioning is an adaptive solution within the system. And reducing greenhouse gas emissions seeks to change it, pointing to the root of the problem. The report found that most solutions currently being implemented focus on delaying the problem rather than truly addressing the root causes. He noted that we must understand the difference between adapting to risk inflection points and avoiding risk inflection points, and between actions that postpone imminent risks and actions that lead us to transform threats.