Satya Narayana Rao
Climate justice is imperative entailment to ensure a balanced and equitable distribution of effects, liabilities, and benefits related to climate change and the actions to encounter it. This emphasizes the significant need in addressing the overwhelming consequences of climate change on marginalized populations. Climate Justice demands cognitive policy reformations with international cooperation and community support. Climate justice is a fundamental framework of action plans in which whole countries collectively work together to combat crises as quickly as should be. There is a significance of the interrelations between climate justice and plastic pollution. Plastic pollution has taken the world into notorious long-term effects on regional environmental patterns. The usage of plastics has revolutionized Homo sapiens daily lives but excessive and thoughtless usage has inversely breached chaos into sentient environment ecosystems and biodiversity. The emissions of greenhouse gases and global warming caused by the plastic production process themselves aggravate the climatic vulnerabilities that local people already confront nowadays. This global issue is also exacerbated by ineffective waste management systems, poor disposal procedures, and a lack of infrastructure maintenance. Plastics have infiltrated massively into continental regions around the world. About 400 million metric tons of plastics are currently produced by humans each year as well 50 to 70 million metric tons end up in the ocean. This portion of annual accumulations waste has drastically changed our environmental chain by jeopardizing biodiversity. The aquatic and marine ecosystems are suffering miserably from microplastic debris. They are ingesting plastics which intuitively affect their functional body system and end up dead.
The microplastics alter the marine food chain where ingested pollutants will be carried to the next food chain cycle which is known as biomagnification. In fact, tragic of plastics not only stop there but eventually expands to a level where other marine organisms fall victim to entanglement and suffocations. Corals are beautiful home shelters for marine fishes which are imperatively affected by plastic litter. Corals cannot digest microplastic components that build up in their internal digestive systems causing waste trap and fragment branching species of hard corals. The loss of targeted species biodiversity is an unavoidable impact of plastic pollution. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has highlighted that plastic pollution is vital precedence of Nordic Regions to combat against loss of diversity in the environment. Plastics disrupt our ambient environment as it clogs substantial drainage systems and natural flow regime alterations. This leads to a negative impact as bioaccumulation of pollutants occurs in regions due to surface runoff or water flow.
Plastics have caused many environmental tragic events on our planet. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is one of the tragedies of plastics waste accumulations due to ocean gyres and circulation which end up at one region of place located between Hawaii and California. This crisis has devastated marine life ecosystems and the breakdown of plastic debris also caused chemical decomposition such as ethylene or vinyl chloride to elevate climate changes. Terrestrial habitats that consume polluted water in lakes or river eventually leads them to get potential transmission of diseases and toxic. Plastic pollution is not only a direct threat to ecosystem habitats or wildlife but also can impact human health through contamination of water or food sources. An adverse community that lives alongside a river whose whole life depends on fresh quality water sources will get impacted severely if exposed to plastic debris or waste. Plastic pollution is impacting the diet of humans. The consumption of seafood has risen among local people nowadays which makes the situation even worst when seafood is built up or ingested with microplastics. This situation can bring destruction to food security levels and an outbreak of hormonal diseases. Plastic pollution dominates economic implications which signifies the urgency of addressing this issue and strategizing effective solutions.
The cost of cleaning up plastic waste is enormously big. Both Government and Non-Government Agencies need to allocate money to engage in social services such as cleaning up rivers, beaches, or lakes in urban areas. This also includes the investment in technological infrastructures to collect waste plastic disposals. Technology plays an important part to sustain green business solutions. For example, Boyan Slat Interceptor is a high-technology solar-powered machine that could process, analyze, collect, and track plastics in water bodies. Its autonomous manufacturing design enabled it to perform at rigid and static performances. Other economic implications include tourism market size and recreation. Coastal areas that indulge in plastic debris reduce tourism attractions and their lack of interest will surely impact loss in revenues. This is because tourist prefers aesthetic visual views of nature and having polluted areas could destroy their motive of traveling and interest. The plastic pollution crisis will dispute employment opportunities too. Restaurants that depended on tourists will be affected critically and their business cannot be run over a long time. In other scenarios, plastics that float on marine water surfaces impact those fishery-based industries. During fish catchment at sea, plastic accumulations entangle together with marine fish in fishing nets causing the quality of fish to be dull. Those captured fish sold at the market impact local businesses as customers could detect bad smells and poor quality of fish causing them not to buy it. Sometimes, fishermen also struggle to capture fish in certain areas but they do encounter a reduction in the population density of species. In the event that marine life ceases to exist, the lack of a varied fish population would lead to a lack of commercial fishing opportunities. In a nutshell, addressing climate justice plans is a must to combat national crisis issues especially tragic events such as plastic pollution. Plastic pollution has devastated our nation and planet and our next generation will be affected into more complicated implications. To avoid all those possibilities, it is our duty and responsible to safeguard the environment effectively. The survival of the earth is in our hands and we should protect it at any cost. As intellectual beings, we should combat this issue as fast as could to ensure our children and beloved ones are safe and sound. Today, we are standing up to be the change we want to see.
Institution: University Sultan Zainal Abidin
Country: Malaysia
Email: satyapluto9@gmail.com
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