A Perspective: ELECTION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

All the major political parties for the big date 25^th July 2018 brought some green proposals to full their bags with worthy votes. Let’s go very honest, how many of us think about the Environmental Impacts of Election 2018?? This critique will look at the environmental impacts of political parties’ campaigns talking about the reduction of environmental issues.

At the beginning towards the election campaigns 2018; we saw that the political parties for their campaigns hired many vehicles whether motorbikes, trucks or cars just to herald eminence on another, trying to get popularity, rallying on the long roads. This means that there were more the vehicles on the roads, the more fuel was exploited and more was the Carbon emissions. Even though the parties have some environmental proposals in their manifesto like cutting carbon emissions, but they didn’t even care about carbon emissions in their marketing campaigns. In this advanced era, a developing country like Pakistan does not have biofuel friendly vehicles. The congestion on the roads, the psychological impacts that nerve wrecking traffic jam caused, are also the other considerable issues.

We saw marketing campaigns exploited exhaustive loudspeakers superseding at the night time leading escalating noise pollution, no matter whether it’s nearby hospitals or caused domestic disturbances. Even the people in different rallies they joined, are now going through limited hearing or started listening loud and become habitual of it because of their ability to perceive sound is getting low day after day without them even realizing it.

Another aspect which I would like to bring light on is the light pollution whether we accept it or not, besides local business, markets, wedding halls till late night addition of camps on the commercial road with extra noise and lights along with traffic jams increased the burden on environment and making it unhealthy to live, disturbing every man and woman living nearby commercial areas and non-commercial residential areas.

The camps everywhere were setup by digging up the roads to hold them straight, intensifying voids that cause shaky travelling if particularly talking about the roads in Karachi. The process of building roads is already exhausting for travellers as the diversions cause long routes, and the process of digging, sometimes damages the water pipeline underground leading to water loses.

At the culmination of election climax, we are standing here to see the paper posters and plastic banners of all political parties either hanging on the poles or walls eventually starts embellishing the streets and roads, becoming the part of the garbage. Paper pamphlets and brochures are already sweeping the streets.

Save Environment Campaign

On the Facebook page, I learned that some of us really worried for plastic shoppers to recycle them including The Human Academy in Karachi putting an effort to recycle the posters used by the campaigns and they wanted all of us to courier those posters and banners to them, so they would recycle it. This is small effort doing by students in there.

I would like to draw the urgent attention of our upcoming government towards the Urban Transport in improving its efficiency, taking it to the Bio-friendly transport system and reduction of carbon emission. According to World Bank Data, Pakistan’s carbon emission from transport system contributes to 28.93% in 2014 from 1971. So, there is a dire need to take on this issue as well.

In the nutshell I would say the Mother Earth is a living being like us, we are a small living creature living on it, littering it with all possible aspects. We should remember one important thing is what we give to the Earth, it will return us the same. The air, water, noise and land pollution we are facing, are the impacts of our own activities; nobody had come to us from somewhere out of world and done this to us. We are solely responsible for our own actions and attitudes.

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