Over recent years, the world has seen a significant deterioration in the quality of the environment, especially in major urban cities. Environmental aspects like water and air quality have all taken a hit for the worse. This essay will explore the possible reasons to why that may have been caused and go through the solutions that can be put into place in order to fight the battle of poor environment.
One of the prominent reasons to why the environment has become critical is due to a continuous increase in the population at a really high rate. An increase in the population signifies an increase in the need of basic amenities like hospitals, schools, vehicles. This sudden increase in the need of these amenities has caused rapid urbanization which causes harm to the environment due to needs of materials in construction, the ways these required materials are extracted isn’t known to be very sustainable and causes significant harm to the environment. An increase in population certainly marks an increase in the amount of vehicles in service as people need to get to places where they need to be, this escalation in demand of vehicles directly increases carbon emissions contributing towards worse air quality. Major Cities like Delhi which is the capital of India, have been affected the worst by these situations, Delhi is one of the world’s most intensely populated cities and due to this It has had record breaking numbers in it’s air quality marking towards AQI levels 80 times worse than what is recommended by the W.H.O (WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION).
Another noteworthy reason to worsening Environment is waste management. Waste materials need to be decomposed in a safe way inorder to prevent any harm towards the environment. However it is evident that most urban cities have not taken good measures towards this fact and caused growing concerns for the environment. The air is abused by the factories, excreting their harmful gases into the atmosphere. The water is filled with sewer waste, the land with plastic bags and other harmful materials for the soil. This abuse has been persistent for multiple decades and has caused us to be put in a harsh spot. Cities have been proficient with building high sky-scrapers and massive factories. However, it still seems that in the terms of managing the waste materials that come as result from the development of these structures, they still seem to be stuck at an emerging stage and seem rather unconcerned for this growing emergency.
In spite of everything there are certainly ways these issues can be prevented. One of them is by inflicting strict rules over factories and other sources of waste materials to practice safe and sustainable ways of dumping unfruitful products collected. The people in charge should additionally invest into researching and learning about sustainable ways of gathering materials for construction of urban infrastructure. In order to target growing concerns in emissions from vehicles, governments should offer benefits or some form of reward from using carbon neutral vehicles like electric cars. The government can also invest in efficient public transport which can help decrease the amount of vehicles and can directly contribute to a healthier atmosphere. Nevertheless, all of these actions would not be effective until the public is aware of the consequences of their actions and must be educated towards environmental dangers, this could be done by hosting free seminars for people to attend, by sending messages from the government to the citizens, by promoting this message to the youth in schools and universities. A way of enforcing these laws would be to make fines and other consequences to anybody disobeying these laws or abusing the environment.
Ultimately, there is no doubt that cities currently are facing critical environment problems and need to work on their policies and priorities. However, with small actions and investments a lot of these issues can be targeted a resolved resulting into a much more pleasant and livable environment.