As White Melts Black Thickens to Threaten the Planet

Imagine that every single second 24,000 tons of blinding white ice solidified thousands of years back melts and adds blue water to the world's oceans? 

That is equivalent to 750 billion tons of ice every year. Reason? The black emissions. Effect? Deaths of polar bears that live only in ice continents in polar regions. The fiery dance of colours, white, blue and black has resulted in making the Arctic and Antarctic continents fragile and ranked as the first to start vanishing in our lifetime.

The Arctic's King - Polar Bear is declared a Vulnerable Specie by IUCN. The time has probably come when polar bears in toy shops in the glittering mall would be more than polar bears on the darkening poles of our planet. Two-thirds of the world's polar bears could be extinct by 2050 as stated by the Centre of Biological Diversity. That would be a huge loss to the blue planet called 'Earth'

COP 27, a climate conference held in 2022, agreed to the establishment of the Loss and Damage fund. The biodiversity conference, COP 15, ended with a landmark agreement to guide global action for the conservation of Nature with a timetable.

The question is who would pay the polar bears for their loss of life? Or should they helplessly wait for action by human communities, which is not forthcoming for the last 3 decades?

The failure of the UN Climate Change Conference to keep the 1.5 deg C target symbolises the failure of the actions by the UN Biodiversity Conference aiming to address biodiversity loss, restore the ecosystem and protect indigenous rights. One cannot progress without the support of another. Working in silos would make the ecosystem on the cliff of death.

The only ways out are to join hands and forge partnerships between universities. Making campuses living laboratories for net zero and zero loss of biodiversity is the way forward. See sccnhub.com.

 Ar. Durga Kamat

Project Coordinator, Smart Campus Cloud Network

LEED GA, IGBC AP Associate

Environmental Architect