Actions Taken by Governments and Organizations in Protecting the Environment

Protecting the Environment 1
PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT
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Protecting the Environment 2
Introduction
Environmental problems create heavy burdens in all communities around the world. From the
arid and semi-arid countries in Africa like Namibia to low-lying countries like Bangladesh, to
northern hemisphere countries all have felt the weight of environmental degradation in one way
or the other. Over the last twenty-five years, sea levels have risen, deforestation has been
witnessed everywhere, earth’s temperature has been increasing at an alarming rate, and rivers
have dried up. Despite governments and organizations teaming up and trying to conserve forests
and prevent the destruction of the climate system, their efforts have failed terribly (Lesser 2013,
p. 32). Even after trying for that long, we are not yet environmentally sustainable. The question
that needs to be answered is why the environment has continued to go downfall despite there
being plans and agendas by organizations and the government to protect the environment from
pollution and destruction. Why has the world environment not yet sustainable despite all what
has been done? The fact is that world policies have failed on their part across every continent
(Cheng and Lai 2012 p. 241). The purpose of this essay is to discuss how actions taken by the
governments and organizations have mostly been unsuccessful in protecting the environment.
The thought of how the planet would be today without the efforts of environmental activists and
human rights groups would probably make one shudder. It is of the essence to acknowledge that
without their hard-won victories over the past few years the world would have been in a worse
state than it is today. Probably, most of the forests would have been completed wiped out by now
to create land for farming and many rivers would have dried by now (Desombre 2011 143).
Research shows that although governments in both developed and developing countries have
been trying to go green for many years, their actions have been successful in achieving this.
Evidence from environmental key indicators show that nothing much has been achieved but

Protecting the Environment 3
instead, the situation have been worsening. For example, more than 48% of world tropical and
sub-tropical forests have been lost to deforestation over the past 20 years. Emission of
greenhouse gases which have contributed to climate change have almost doubled and at the same
time, the impacts of climate change are now felt like never before. Population of indigenous
species and biodiversity index has reduced by more than 50 % (Lesser 2013 p. 31).
Additionally, the human population has exceeded the earth capacity and this has resulted to over-
consumption of natural resources (Mingst, 2013 93). People cut down trees to create space for
ever-growing population notably in the developing countries. The government especially the
federal government in the United States and organizations of course are much aware of these
global trends and has been doing everything in their capacity to curb this problem. But within the
government itself environmental efforts have not been able to succeed in preventing
environmental decline (Boehmer 2007, p. 47). So what could be going wrong with sustainable
environment initiatives? Apart from government effort, business managers have been responding
to environmental problems through redesigning their products to be more environmentally
friends and also that will not use more natural resources. Besides, organizations have come up
with innovative ways of conserving the environment such as using alternative sources of energy
instead of fuels. But still, the problem is despite all this efforts nothing is changing at all
(Fogleman 2013, p. 54). Research shows that three types of failures namely political, economic,
and communication keep recurring and preventing the success of attaining a sustainable and a
green environment. The economic problem occurs when people see that they get financial gains
when they damage the environment. For instance, when people cut down trees for timber, they
focus on getting but while they forget that that the future generations will suffer when they get a
bare planet without trees (Clark, Hakim and Panguluri 2018 p.127). Secondly, the political