By Ezekiel Talatau
THE world Environment day, Ocean day and the Coral Triangle day events last Saturday at Children’s park, show a lot of effort and enjoyable activities involving speech, clean-up campaign, lunch, and competition prize.
The groups participating in the events were, friends of the city, ministry fisheries, Ministry of Environment, Climate change, Disaster Management and meteorology (MECDM), Vura youth groups, Mbua-valley Scout youths, Ghetto Youths, strive for change, St Nicholas youths and Deaf Association.
The ministry of fisheries director said, “Today is the day that we must honour and respect our Environment, our Ocean and our Reef as we Solomon Island Citizens are dependent on these resources for our daily needs.
He also stated that the country economic income also depended on our resources and we must work together to sustain and maintain our environment, both in terrestrial and marine ocean. We need to address this issue and make awareness about how crucial the ocean plays in our life and how special the oceans connected the island states.
Solomon Island is very fortunate to be part of the World Triangle Region with highest biodiversity of marine life. This is our proud heritage that we need to protect, conserve and manage our natural resources by reducing the plastic as a theme for today.
“Gizo is 2 to 3 days ahead of us celebrating the world Environment, Ocean and Coral Triangle day in effort to join the globe in fighting against plastics to keep our environment clean and green and our ocean to blue.
Director of fisheries further stated that Plastics are greater threats to our environment and ocean. They are non-biodegradable (Non-decompose) and most of them end up on the ocean. Just imagine how many individuals use plastics and how many throw rubbish and will end up in the ocean.
Let’s not forget that we all depend on our ocean and environment for many things includes, our cultural identity, traditional values, economics, foods, livelihoods and even for environmental protection Just names a few.
Honiara is full of plastics, started from shops, homes and down along the drainage, river stream and ended up in the ocean. This creates a big problem to our environment and ocean and animals in the ocean.
Director of ministry stated that some studies have shown that an estimation of about 70 to 90 percent of marine debris is plastics. This creates threats to the ocean which leads to plastic debris or pollution. Many ocean animals are dead of being entangle of ingested plastics. This is a really big threat to our environment and our ocean and we need to address this issue as a whole country.
We must fight together against plastics and make this opportunity to promote and remind us all on 4Rs (Reduce reused, Recycle and refuse).
