Editorial
Record-setting air polluter
We must clean up our act
Yet again we set a record -- as the second worst air polluted country in the world, according to the 2012 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), a study conducted by top US universities Yale and Columbia and presented at the World Economic Forum taking place in Davos. In the overall ranking, which also includes performance indicators such as environmental health, water pollution, water resources, biodiversity and habitat, forests, fisheries, agriculture and climate change, Bangladesh stood 115th; but in terms of only containing air pollution, the country scored 13.7 out of 100, standing 131st out of 132 countries, second last only to India.
For Bangladeshis, especially residents of the capital, it does not take an international report to understand the gravity of the environmental situation. They live and breathe it every day. The mushrooming of concrete structures everywhere, the unbridled invasion of automobiles and, most importantly, the fast disappearing greenery in the cities are sign enough of the environmental dangers, translating into health hazards.
While every individual has a role to play in protecting the environment through their every action, the authorities have an even greater responsibility -- to conduct research on the situation, identify the aggravating factors, form stringent policies to mitigate them, and, most importantly, to implement those policies without compromise. Air pollution contributes to climate change and the vicious cycle of environmental hazards continues. And in all our big talk of saving the environment and country for our future generations, not only are we not doing anything of the sort, but we fail to realise that, in the meantime, our own lives are being cut short due to reasons that could very well be avoided with the application of simple civic sense. While, after all the national and international reports and conferences, a 'clean, green world' may have come to sound like a cliché, it is the only one we will actually be able to survive in.
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