Stepping into Sustainability: How World Environment Day Inspires Global Action and Local Impact

What is World Environment Day?

World Environment Day is a globally celebrated event designed with the world in mind. The United Nations dedicated June 5th, to encouraging worldwide awareness and action for the ever-evolving devastating impact our planet faces daily. This day was established in 1972 during the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the first world conference where global leaders came together to discuss the earth’s catastrophic damage, thus establishing it as a major issue that requires undivided attention.

World Environment Day is a multifaceted vehicle for change, with several key objectives at its core – including, but not limited to; raising awareness, encouraging global action from leaders and civilians alike, promoting policy changes and enforcing environmental regulations, fostering global co-operation and encouraging future generations to get involved.

What's this Year's National Environment Day Theme?

Each year, this day adopts a specific theme that highlights a particular environmental issue, with previous years seeing a focus on biodiversity, pollution, and sustainable consumption.

This year, we focus on land restoration, desertification, and drought. And as the slogan so simply puts it, this is ‘Our Land. Our future. We are #GenerationRestoration’.

How can you Help this National Environment Day?

Now let’s delve into how you can support the initiative from your space in the world, wherever that may be. You can play a significant role in land restoration, combating desertification, and building drought resilience through various actions and community initiatives such as composting, supporting green spaces, saving water, supporting policies, and signing petitions.

One of the easiest and quickest ways you can support the movement and promote environmental change is by replacing wheels with feet. By upping your step count and choosing to walk wherever possible, you’ll not only be doing your health and well-being a favour, but you’ll also be contributing to the reduction of carbon emissions, reducing a need for excessive transport infrastructure, supporting the decrease of soil compaction and promoting water conservation. Virtual step and physical activity challenges are a perfect way to encourage movement among employees, with Terryberry’s platform offering the bonus of a challenge map library – participants can travel the globe, learn new cultures and recipes, and even educate themselves on the historical happenings of the world, all without ever stepping foot on an airplane, which we all know is wreaking havoc on our ecosystem.

Another fundamental method for reducing your personal impact on climate change is through planting trees, whether that’s by joining a local community group or planting some in your back garden, it all counts! If you want your workplace to get involved, try seeking employee wellbeing initiatives that incorporate tree planting as a reward system.  Look for step and movement challenges that are committing to planting trees for a number of steps or activities achieved during the initiative. Terryberry recently worked with Mars Petcare, a global pet care and nutrition provider, who collectively logged a total of 191,496,114 steps during their challenge – with a challenge of this size, alongside a commitment to plant one tree per every 5,000 steps logged, you and your team could plant a whopping 38,299 trees!