World Meteorological Day: Powering our future with weather, climate and water.

 23^rd March: World Meteorological Day;

The other day, World Community of Foresters, Environmentalist, Biodiversity Conservationist and Nature Lovers celebrated the World Forestry Day with a note to reach to the common man, the importance of forest and the need for its conservation with sustainable utility. While celebrating the day, emphasis regarding the link between the green coverage and stream flow would have been definitely made, and so came the importance of forest for water and water for life.

Because they purify and slow the flow of water to the sea, helping to control floods and water pollution, the wetlands are considered as “the world’s kidneys.” As water is essential for food production whose demand is ever escalating owing to the arithmetic rise in worlds population, the foresters then joined the FAO agencies and world community to celebrate the importance of water on World Water Day yesterday with the theme “Water and Food Security.”

Forests are further considered as “the world’s lungs” because they take carbon from the atmosphere and produce oxygen, and it is this function that has attracted growing attention in recent years as the world faces the challenge of Climate Change. And as the world celebrates the World Meteorological Day today, the need for conservation of forest to ameliorate the climate is re-emphasized. The theme for World Meteorological Day 2012 is “Powering our future with weather, climate and water,” and this focuses on the critical roles of weather, climate and water services in powering a sustainable future for us and for generations to come.

Photo courtesy of Satori13  

Every year news headlines the newspapers where hurricanes and storms devastated the homes of civilians, where drought hit the farms of our peasants, and where the impact of climate change has is painfully felt. The greatest injustice on our watch is that those who did the least to cause climate change are the first and hardest hit.

So, to secure the life of our successors fully lies in the present generations. In this regard, Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of WMO has conveyed a message to the world and some important excerpts are as follows;

“Certain human activities are contributing to the warming of the climate system and have dire effects on our natural environment, such as increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea levels.”

“It will be extremely important to ensure that in all our efforts to implement the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS), in particular to contribute to sustainable development, we always keep in mind the need to minimize as much as possible the atmospheric release of greenhouse gases.”

“Vulnerable communities around the globe are struggling to increase their effectiveness in preventing or mitigating natural disasters, close to 90 per cent of which over the last 50 years have been linked to weather, climate and water hazards.”

 “WMO has continued to stress that Least-developed Countries (LDCs), Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and other vulnerable developing countries should be increasingly empowered to use early warning systems to safeguard their fragile sustainable development, as well as the environment and the global climate, for present and future generations.”

“While many renewable energy projects must necessarily be large-scale, several ‘green’ technologies like wind, solar and hydropower are especially well-suited for the rural and remote areas,”

“Biomass production involves using garbage or even crops, such as corn, sugar cane or other vegetation, to generate bio-fuel or as a direct combustion material. However, care must be exercised not to release an even more powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than the one we seek to avoid in the first place, as well as not to jeopardize, through energy generation, the food security resources of the concerned population.”

“By scaling up renewable energy and other low-emission technologies, it would be possible to provide universal access to modern energy services by 2030 without significantly increasing greenhouse gas emissions.”

“The 13 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997 and global temperatures in 2011 were higher than any previous La Niña year, an event which usually has a cooling influence. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have continued to increase unabated, reaching an all-time high in 2011.”

           Read the full Message HERE;

image courtesy: google images;