Channel: Knowledge Dunia

Category: Education

Tags: usaknowledge dunianaturegermanyclean environmentpollutionindiacovid19कहानियांपहले और अबbefore afterchinalockdownलॉकडाउनitaly

Description: लॉकडाउन कहानियां: पहले और अब Lockdown Stories : Before And After Now in our third week of the not quite a lockdown, lockdown, we’re all aware of the personal challenges we’re facing, but what about the positives. Is there more to gain than lose from this experience and how can we maintain the benefits? Chris Rigby, a councillor and a longstanding environmental activist discusses more. You don’t have to look far to see how restricting people’s movements have had a positive impact on the environment, You do however have to seek out news coverage a bit more than the climate change articles which had been getting more and more prevalent since the large Extinction Rebellion protests in April 2019 and now have all but been replaced with articles about the virus. The restrictions on what people can, and cannot do has seen travel companies grounding their fleets of planes, my closest airport, Bournemouth, currently has approximately £1billion worth of planes parked up, including up to 10% of the British Airways fleet. The sound of traffic passing my open window has all but disappeared, occasional delivery vehicles are pretty much limited to those supplying supermarkets and other grocery shops, and a large proportion of people, including myself, are now able to work from home when we’ve previously been told that this wouldn’t be possible. Others, less fortunate, are unable to work at all, with the Government planning to pay up to 80% of their wages. These reduced levels of transport has seen a reduction in air pollution across the UK, early data sets show large cities have seen decreases of a third to a half in tiny particle pollution and similar decreases in Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels. When you consider that in London alone air pollution is held responsible for 9,400 extra deaths a year and globally up to 7million people annually, it may be that if we maintain lower air pollution levels post this pandemic we may save more lives through cleaner air than are lost to the virus. A study from Stamford University suggests that 20 times more lives may be saved in reduced air pollution deaths than are lost to Covid_19. It calculates calculate that having 2 months of 10ug/m3 reductions in pollutants of less than 2.5micrometers likely has saved the lives of 4,000 kids under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China. Whilst I in no way want to trivialise the number of lives lost during this crisis, it is important to consider what we normally dismiss as the hidden health costs of the status quo.