This years theme for the World Environment Day is biodiversity and restoration of natural habitats.
After the year we have all been through, and with the knowledge that loss of biodiversity is a contributing factor to the pandemic the world is still fighting off, - what better way to see how connected we are to nature, and how we can also help it! The official World Environment Day site offers many ideas on how we can contribute and be the #GenerationRestoration . For the same reason, the UN has called the decade we have now entered the The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
As I am always interested in how can we bring this down to earth, and make it easy to find ways to contribute to this, I want to share some ideas for how we as civil society and individuals can do our share:
Make a seed ball and trow it somewhere on your way home from school/work/on your daily walk. Recipe in Norwegian here. For non-Norwegian readers, this is very easy. You simply make a ball of dirt/soil and put some seeds in it, and throw it in the side of the road.
“Lazy-lawns” is one of the easiest way you can contribute to biodiversity at home. How do you do it? You simply let your grass grow, and give all the different flowers and weeds a chance to grow. This will help pollinators, like bees, have a better chance of survival. Which again helps us humans and everything in nature.
Chose an area of nature close to your home and chose to love it and protect it. It can a an area close to water, or maybe your local walk? Make it a priority to hold this area free from plastic litter and other types of rubbish thrown in nature. If 1/5 people picks just 5 pieces of plastic in nature every day, 35 tons of plastic is removed from nature every day! Be that person.
Plant a tree. Seeing something green from your window is very uplifting, and research tells us the benefits this can have to our mental health. Why not plant a tree from somewhere you can see every day, and enjoy watching it grow?
