The environmental problems faced by the world today are painfully familiar. Rather these are getting worse day by day. Despite the Earth Summit, and despite success stories like the Montreal Protocol to protect the Ozone Layer or the very recent 2015 Paris climate conference (COP21), human beings continue to plunder the global environment. We are failing to protect resources and ecosystems. We are failing to invest enough in alternative technologies for betterment of environment. This will in fact continue to affect the world’s unless more national appropriate climate change mitigation actions are taken into consideration for priorities.

Understanding of the environmental challenges we face is alarmingly low. It is imperative that environmental issues must be fundamentally repositioned in the policy-making arena. The environment must become better-integrated into mainstream economic policy of every country.

Rwanda is a role model, and other countries should learn to our success story. Environmental friendly agreements are one thing good, but implementation of the agreements is then another golden thing that should be kept into consideration.

Governments therefore must not only create environmental agreements, rather they must strictly enforce them as well. Some good initiatives and agreements were signed, but what about the implementation !

Our environment continues to face serious environmental degradation making situations unbearable to live in. A man is armed with both weapons of destruction and also those of construction and development. Unknowingly, man’s weapons of reconstruction and development have negative consequential results affecting us in different ways.

A refinery for instance, is producing fuel for all our needs but the same refinery is polluting our atmosphere, as well, making habitation unbearable. Vehicles carry us to any destination but same vehicles fill our atmosphere with carbon monoxide, which can equally kill us. Airplanes, combustion of waste do the same !

Testing of chemical, biological and nuclear military weapons has created an irreversible disaster for our environment and atmosphere. There is a lot of finger light sight of the world.
There seems to be a tug of war between developed and developing countries. The developed countries blame it on the developing world, by citing areas such as over population and illiteracy for environmental degradation.

Developing countries, however, argue that developed countries are the ones that throw their wastes in lakes, seas, oceans, deserts and in forests. They are the ones that pollute the air from their big factories and industries. They are the ones that test weapons in the oceans and deserts. But do we need to accuse one another ? No.

Climate change represents a serious threat to every part of the globe, and it would be ridiculous to believe that this is just another issue being pushed by the developed countries down the throats of the developing world. It must be borne in our mind that living in a clean and better world will improve life for all of us, no matter where we live.

Eying back to the white outcomes of some good initiatives put in place for a green world,
World Environment Day has been a success story to raise awareness and public attention to protect environment. Accordingly the day needs not to be seen just a day set aside in a year to discuss, undertake and solve environment issues as they affect the world. But means and measures to protect our environment have to be considered in our daily plans. It should not be just one day in a week, month, a year or decade but every day of our lives.

Rather, we need to examine critically the state of our environment and to consider carefully the actions which each of us must take, and then address ourselves to our common task of preserving all life on earth.

If we really need a green world, climate change mitigation and risks reduction with global warming which continue to arise, we do need to make it our responsibilities and commitment to preserve our green economy. Furthermore national appropriate mitigation actions should be reinforced and more effort needs to be put in monitoring and evaluation for the implementation and feasibility of green agreements being set.
By NTWALI M. Olivier