opinion

June 5 is World Environment Day.

In October 1972, the 27th session of the UN General Assembly set it forth as a common task of humankind to protect environment and decided to secure international cooperation in this field and to mark World Environment Day annually on June 5.

Since then, the international community has directed a lot of efforts toward protecting the ecological environment of the Earth, the home of humans.

However, contrary to the desire of humankind, the destruction of global environment is getting worse day after day.

According to the Secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, up to 40 percent of the world’s land is degraded, having a direct impact on about 3.2 billion people across the world. Especially, rural communities and the extremely poor are hit hardest. Since 2000, the number and duration of droughts have increased by 29 percent and, without urgent action, droughts are said to affect over three quarters of the world’s population by 2050.

Human-induced environmental damage is escalating and, consequently, the international community faces the triple planetary crises: the crisis of climate change, the crisis of nature and biodiversity loss and the crisis of pollution and waste, which are constantly threatening the world’s ecosystems.

It arises as a common task of humankind to protect environment and restore land and nature to the original state.

Accordingly, the UN set land restoration as a key pillar of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030) for the protection and revival of ecosystems all around the world.

The UN Environment Programme set “Our Land, Our Future. We are #Generation Restoration” as the theme of World Environment Day 2024.

Now, many countries are channelling positive efforts to solving the issues of land degeneration, desertification and drought damage.

The DPRK is also forging ahead with the protection of land.

In keeping with its geological features of having many mountains and rivers, the DPRK is constantly managing and protecting forests, rivers and coastlines and giving priority to afforestation and water conservation to thoroughly prevent the land loss by landslides and floods. 

All people are actively turning out in the tree-planting movement and taking good care of the saplings to raise their rooting rate. In the spring of this year alone, over 100 million trees have been planted in tens of thousands of hectares of forests across the country.

On the basis of the analyses of the soil composition for each area, the agricultural sector carpeted fields with humus soil, applied a large amount of organic fertilizers and planted green manure crops so as to improve the fertility of paddy and dry fields.

The state imposed strict disciplines in land use and tightened supervision and control over it, and the social interest in land protection is continuously growing.

It is an important task before our generation to protect land, a precious treasure of the country.