The 10th Eco-generation Environmental Essay Competition

Samsung Engineering jointly with UN Environment would like to launch “The 10^th Eco-generation Environmental Essay Competition” inviting the youth all over the world to raise awareness on the theme of the upcoming World Environment Day – Connecting People to Nature.

As many of you know, World Environment Day is the United Nations’ flagship day for encouraging worldwide awareness and action for the environment. Over the years, it has grown to be one of the largest global platforms for public outreach celebrated by over a million of people in well over 100 countries. Hosted by Canada, this year’s World Environment Day has the theme Connecting People to Nature, and the slogan, “I’m With Nature.” The idea that underpins this is that in our modern world few of us take enough time away from our daily lives to appreciate and engage with our magnificent natural world. By celebrating World Environment Day surrounded by this beauty, we can rediscover the importance of caring for the environment so that it can care for us.

To commemorate WED and its annual theme, Eco-generation would like to celebrate the bigger and better WED than ever and to call on Tunza Eco-generation members around the world to show their love and affection for our shared natural world with an environmental essay.

The value of nature

In recent decades, scientific advances as well as growing environmental problems such as global warming are helping us to understand the countless ways in which natural systems support our own prosperity and well-being.

For example, the world’s oceans, forests and soils act as vast stores for greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane farmers and fisher-folk harness nature on land and under water to provide us with food scientists develop medicines using genetic material drawn from the millions of species that make up Earth’s astounding biological diversity.

Billions of rural people around the world spend every working day ‘connected to nature’ and appreciate full well their dependence on natural water supplies and how nature provides their livelihoods in the form of fertile soil. They are among the first to suffer when ecosystems are threatened, whether by pollution, climate change or over-exploitation.

Nature’s gifts are often hard to value in monetary terms. Like clean air, they are often taken for granted, at least until they become scarce. However, economists are developing ways to measure the multi-trillion-dollar worth of many so-called ‘ecosystem services’, from insects pollinating fruit trees in the orchards of California to the leisure, health and spiritual benefits of a hike up a Himalayan valley.