Essay on the topic of climate change What time has shown me with summary. Length: 4000 words + Summary: 200 words Bài luận mẫu về chủ đề thay đổi khí hậu What time has shown me (Thời gian đã cho tôi thấy những gì). Có kèm bài tóm tắt. Độ dài: 4000 từ + Phần tóm tắt 200 từ
ABSTRACT Not all of us really care about climate change until it takes its heavy toll on our very lives. I was one of those who did not. Time has passed. I came to realize its real consequences when I witnessed changing weather patterns bringing harship to the lives of millions of farmers in my country, tough droughts posing threats to people’s health, catastrophic floods making the dream of going to schools of poverty – stricken children more abstract, high temperature seizing the plain pleasure of my grandmother. Time has passed. I also came to realize that we youth can address the problem with our bold and collaborative initiatives. Becoming green entrepreneurs is one of such initiatives, by doing the job of green distributors, running recycling plants or building clean “traditional shopping mall” for street vendors. In order to support all these activities, what needed is creating a strong network allowing young activists to share their knowledge and concerns, to voice their green ideas and receive support to put them into practice, to encourage people to protect the environment and to meet like-minded youngsters who are making daily efforts to contribute to the changes that we all wish to see. Time is passing. No excuse is therefore available for indecisiveness. Dealing with climate change is a huge task but with clear objectives and a team attitude, we will make it achievable. WHAT TIME HAS SHOWED ME When I was 10, I read an article about the meltdown of icebergs and glaciers in the North Pole and thought that the so-called global warming was so distant and somehow the imaginary product of over-anxious scientists. When I was 13, I saw on the news the image of a woman in Mozambique giving birth in a treetop surrounded by raging floodwaters. This image has haunted me since and I knew that climate change and its consequences were real, however, I thought that it was something only NGOs and the governments had the responsibilities and capabilities to cope with. I am now 22, and when I am writing these few paragraphs, exceptional droughts are reported in the United States, Australia, Spain and my country Vietnam, among other locations. Time has passed. I came to realize that the adverse impacts of climate change have become more obvious and irreversible, sweeping through every single nation. My homeland is no exception. Time has passed. I also came to realize that there is no person or organization alone responsible for and able to address the problem. Everyone has their parts to play in the whole solving process, including me and my peers. My country has a tropical monsoon climate and floods are part of its normal weather cycle. For generations, the Vietnamese in vulnerable areas are used to living with typhoons and floods. However, typhoons have recently increased both in frequency and intensity, making lives even harder. In November last year, the worst floods hit Vietnam in 25 years. Heavy rainfalls lasting for two weeks turned streets into rivers and breached dykes, triggering fatal flooding and making many homeless. Some of them were still in the recovery process of their first houses. After the peak flood had passed, what left behind were collapsed buildings, snapped trees and saline lands which take year to be agriculturally productive again. What’s worse is that flooding tends to last longer and to enlarge its areas of destruction. Not only the most traditionally vulnerable region has it effected, such as Quang Tri in the North but also places which once were natural disaster – free, like Ben Tre in the South. Not far away from the tragedies in these two provinces, Ninh Thuan saw its toughest drought ever. Drought seems to capture the media’s attention much less than floods although its aftermath is equally painful. The loss of forests, grassfields and livestock brings hardship to the lives of countless farmers. Sadly enough, this is just the beginning as the annual average temperature of Vietnam will increase by about 0.1 degrees centigrade per decade. Floods and droughts are just two among a number of extreme weather events due to climate change. My aunt who is a farmer in the less wealthy town of Quang Ngai in central Vietnam has witnessed the fast changing weather patterns. The flooding season normally begins in October or so and storms never arrive as early as April or May. Therefore, during these two months, her husband often goes fishing offshore. The rest of the time they both do farming and this is how they manage to earn their livelihoods. However, in the last two years, their town started experiencing storms in April which adversely affected their fisheries. Their crops were severely damaged either. The rice seedlings died by early flooding and their fruits harvested in hotter dry spells were so poor in quality that they had to feed them to the pigs. My aunt as well as numerous farmers do not know how to react to this abnormalities of the weather. They have firmly relied on ancient knowledge to predict the weather and plan their cultivation activities. Traditional weather forecasting methods, in the form of oral proverbs, have been passed down for generations. Below is an example: “con ech keu lam diec tai Mua thoi sap sua chang sai ti nao” "When the frog is croaking, rain comes". Due to intensive farming practices and the exessive use of chemical fertilizers of farmers in response to the change of weather patterns, the number of frogs have been reduced remarkably. It appears to us that we are losing a source of weather forecasting. We used the behaviour of animals like buffalo, birds or insects to get a sense of what the weather would be like for the coming days, but many of them have changed character to adapt to the new climate conditions. This has made weather forecasting difficult. Comparing the current situation with our traditional knowledge about weather, we are frustratedly aware of a deviation in the weather patterns. Unquestionably, climate change has negative impacts on nearly all sectors of the country’s economy from aquiculture to forestry to fisheries. Nevertheless, it is no longer just an environmental and economic issue but a humanitarian catastrophe in terms of its risks to humans’ health. It affects our health directly, through heat waves and droughts, and indirectly by increasing the occurrences of malaria, cholera, equine encephalitis,… I am still deeply moved when I think of the dengue fever outbreaks in 2006 which killed 77800 people. Because the environment in the majority parts of Vietnam is polluted, it is easier for infectious diseases to spread. In many villages women are hit the hardest by natural disasters. They often cannot swim, have fewer assets to turn to for alternative livelihoods when yields are poor, and have fewer job opportunities away from home. Apart from women, children is one of the most vulnerable groups in society. A great number of children in Vietnam were born and bred in families which survive on less than $2 USD per day. Fundamental necessities of life simply outweigh the need for going to school. A good education is a thing that they just dream of. Disastrous effects of climate change even make that dream more abstract since when a major catastrophe takes its economic toll, naturally these children must leave schools for work. As far as I know, drop-out rates in the countryside during flood season is always high. In addition, children going to school by ferries or boats on a regular basis is hardly a new concept in Vietnam, a country with massive waterway systems. This means of transport means access to schools very inconvenient and dangerous, particularly in the rain season when rivers have a tendency to overflow embankments. In 2006, in a voluntary campaign, my classmates and I went to Ben Tre to help children there renovate their school. Little Luyen, an eight-year-old girl told me: “I can still hear the loud roar that came before the crashing dark waters from the rivers disrupted our class. When we heard someone shout: - The water’s running! we grabbed our books as quickly as we could and rushed for the door. By the time we reached the nearby hillock, everything had been submerged by floodwater. I was worried about my family members who might be caught too far to run to a safe place as I had, but there was nothing I could do. I simply beseeched God to keep them safe and waited for the storm to end…” In the early days we spent most of our time scooping water and sweeping garbage from the classrooms. When I went outside to look up at the sky, it had turned to a clear one with white clouds. I hardly believe it was the same sky that only a few hours earlier had spewed out such suffocating terror. It was almost as though the typhoon had never happened but I knew from the wet and rubbish- filled classrooms and the frightened faces of the pupils that it had indeed been quite real. The peaceful river they travel every day now becomes a horrifying beast which may take away from them anything. The pleasant weather they are familiar to living with, since their ancestors’ time, now has become hard to predict. Everyday is a struggle with the anger of Mother Nature who used to live in harmony with us for thousands of years. Definitely, climate change has effected our lives physically and mentally. I myself suffered from this. My hometown is the land of cherry trees thank for its temperate climate. To make a living, my grandmother grows cherry trees which are probably her most precious property after family. Every year, when the cherry trees come alive in their explosion of pink, we all know it is time for us to celebrate our Lunar New Year, or Tet as we usually call, which often falls some time between the end of January and the middle of February. Flourishing cherry blossoms not only earn money for growers since each family will buy one cherry tree to decorate their houses during Tet, but also bring joy to every mind. For the Vietnamese, so much of the Tet could be missed without cherry blossoms. However, last year, the cherry trees blossomed early, around two weeks prior to Tet. When Tet officially came we saw only lonely stalks standing quietly in our garden. The reason was that the temperature was so high that pushed the cherry blossoms to be at their astonishing best in early January. This spring, it was even hotter and we saw cherry blossoms everywhere one month before Tet arrived. My grandmother was effected economically as people had to buy artificial flowers instead, however, more importantly, this fact hurted her badly. Her life is side by side with cherry tree which is one of many things in the natural world that helped her notice the arrival of each season. Today there are no such signs. When I try to compare my childhood memories with the present climate in my hometown, I admit that things have changed, gradually but steadily. Social indicators have improved in recent years as an effort of Vietnam to meet its Millennium Development Goals, however, millions of poor people may be dragged back into poverty. They may neither know what the term El Niño/La Niña is about nor how the green house effect works but they do know that climate change of various magnitudes are having impacts on their very lives. Never have they gone shopping for a luxurious car whose exhausts contain a range of toxic substances but they have to bear the brunt of the imminent dangers caused by their more affluent social beings. I sadly realize that it is the underprevileged that are hit most by climate change, especially rural dwellers as their economies are linked closely with climate-sensitive resources. This is a very true picture of my country today, a developing one with nearly half or its population living under the poverty line and on the front line of climate change. This picture is very different from that of 50 years ago when floods were not so frequent, the summer was not so hot and the northern delta had four distinctive seasons. Likewise, if things stay the way they are now, this picture will change dramatically 50 years from now, certainly in a negative manner. Sea levels are expected to rise by 33 cm by 2050, which would affect the low-lying two biggest rice producing regions of the country the worst. Then Vietnam, the world second largest rice exporter will lose its position on the market. Additionally, the coastal plains will sink by nearly a meter, including many major cities. Even this year Ho Chi Minh City was flooded during high tides. That sounds like a nightmare to me, imagining that our cities could become islands in the future. Whether this future is real or not primarily depends on the youth of today. Because we young people are the now and the future so our opinions matter most. To deal with this kind of issue, youth have their bold and collaborative initiatives, say to cut greenhouse gas emissions include phasing out coal plants, developing efficient public transport systems; to encourage people taking action in their homes; to promote vegetarianism; a few just to mention. The rapidly growing ‘green economy’ is one such initiative which not only helps the producers to cut costs and build brand name and goodwill among their customers but it is also a step towards creating a sustainable environment for happy living. To socialize the use of wind – mills, solar panels, bio-diesel in Vietnam seems to be a hard task due to the lack of capital and experts. In the future, with the economic surge and the investment from the First World, these fields will take off. However, until that period, there is no time to waste. Vietnam is a developing country and it would be impossible to halt or delay economic development but in the meantime, we can protect the environment in the resources available. Hence in intermediate and short term, there are many things that young people can do to lessen the tension. The opportunities for them to become green entrepreneurs are around every corner. First of all, they can choose to become green distributors. Two stories told me that my country needs these professionals badly. The first story is about rice husks which, after bagasse, are probably the largest source of biomass generated by farming activities. There are no efforts in the collection of this biomass for use as an energy source. They are sometimes transported by junks, boats or barges to be poured into rivers or the ocean, leaving a disposal problem. Taking advantage of the lower cost of this widely available bio-fuel resource, a small process company started using it as a fuel in their steam boilers. It saves 90% more energy than using oil fired steam boilers and 60% in comparision with charcoal ones. Rice husks are totally burned so the ashes are negligible, around 3% of the input of energy. This, on the one hand, led to the sustainable use of rice husks, which was once a disposal problem, and on the other, enabled the process industries to meet their energy needs in a more cost-effective manner. In some provinces of the Mekong Delta, existing oil-fired process steam boilers have been replaced with rice husk-based process steam boilers. How about hundreds of factories around the country who have no idea of this environmentally friendly products or are aware of its existence but have difficulty accessing the supply? The second story is about ethnic minorities in Vietnam who consume wood for household cooking. The practice of cutting trees for firewood is a long-term liability for the country as a whole. Meanwhile the dependent agrarian population living in less remote areas use coal. Such practices are harmful as the firewood or charcoal are the worst climate offenders. The clue for their problems lies in biogas, a renewable power source relying on nothing more than dung for its operation. In order to utilize manure from their cattle to make biogas, farmers need to build biodigesters which are tanks that process the muck to produce biogas. Once biogas units are installed, farmers can obtain a free power supply, produce enough power without using a single piece of wood. A large number of farmers in Ha Tay, Phu Tho and Ho Chi Minh city have installed biogas units on their farms. Its development, nonetheless, work in isolation, poor systems being used, poor maintenance of equipment and bad project choice, only a small proportion of the total alternative energy units installed functioned properly. How can the circumstance be improved? As a matter of fact, Vietnam has enough eco-products, many of them have been imported while others, chiefly user-friendly ones, have been invented by the Vietnamese themselves. The supply is pretty profuse indeed. The only barrier is that such goods cannot reach a large proportion of the population. How can you buy a product without knowing of it? So the role of green distributors is to make sure that green brands are visible, accessible and relevant to targeted consumer segments. Once the distribution channels of these products are extended, cleaner energy solutions may come in sizes that every province could afford because the problem is really not localized. In concrete, we will buy rice husks of farmers and sell to plants whick work in the process industries, like food processing, paper manufacturing, cattle – feed producing, etc. Similarly, we will distribute used sand to make block bricks; compact fluorescent bulbs and other eco-products. At the same time, we will offer marketing support to help producers penetrate new markets as well as raise market shares. We also give them feed-back from consumers so that they can enhance the quality of their products. In the case of biogas, in order to improve the success rate of these units, we will co-ordinating their development on a national level, setting up demonstration units to help spread information about them, restoring abandoned units and training users to operate and maintain them. The prize is enormous. First of all, it will results in a reduction in emissions of pollutants associated with the use of fossil fuels, thereby improving local environmental conditions. Secondly, it will generate employments for local labors. We need local staff to give us the market intelligence, to distribute goods, to transport rice husks. One bonus of using a biogas unit is that women and children, freed from the daily drudgery of fuel collection, the cleaning of smoke- blackened utensils and the disposal of animal waste, have gained more time to spend on various income generating activities. Green distributing can help rural areas solve their issue of energy requirements and waste management. How about cities? Here I came up with the second initiative – develop recycling villages. Being enormous consumers of energy, metropolitan areas are also immense producers of rubbish. Every morning, outside my house stands a mountain of garbage bags. It is astonishing to see how much we use and throw away over a 24 hour cycle. I think how great it is if we can recycle all these refuse to create something new and wonderful. There is a plus to this thought from a business sense. Nevertheless, recycle still sounds unfamiliar to most Vietnamese and recycling programs have been carried out only in a handful of pilot dormitories. We will purchase material from shops in cities and pay them a little more than they would get if recycling for scrap. Then we transport them to villages and have our items hand-made. Vietnam has a lot of traditional craft villages where craftmen produce goods from their skillful hands. Now they can make gifts items from papers or PET bottles; bookshelves or drawers from bamboo crates, for instance. With the skills of the craftmen and wild creativity of young people, I do believe that they will come up with great ideas for their handicraft products’ design and ranges. These products have a great story, a sustainable supply and multiple uses so they will be easily developped into a series. The third simple choice for youngsters in Vietnam to step into the green business is building clean “traditional shopping malls” for street vendors who are adversely affecting urban environment. For years they are familiar with the routine of selling on the streets, no tax paying, having customers easily and comfortably dropping plastic bags, papers, dirty water, leftover food everywhere. A ban on the dumping of wastes on roads will not work as to these citizens, a clean environment is not a priority. They need a decent income to survive in cities. Here businesses can play a role by recruiting these vendors, then moving them to a separate “traditional shopping mall” equipped with refuse bins, a treatment system, connected with proper landfills and incineration plants. Not only would this make the city a better place to live, it would also attract tourists as traditional street vendors is somehow a feature of Vietnamsed culture. As a result, the living standards of these street vendors can be improved. [...]... responsible for educating people on environmental issues as the consciousness of the Vietnamese is very poor A classical case is taking care of the trees We did plant millions of trees in public places, namely intersections, schools, stadiums and parks Singapore did the same thing and it has become the greenest city in Asia Only a small number of our trees has survived by contrast The others simply... they are entering an industry that is cutting edge Today, people are turning their eyes toward environmental issues More and more companies are focusing on going Green In the future when the concept has moved on from “nice to have” to “must have” in Vietnam, as customers are becoming more aware and government is imposing rules and regulations to make companies more eco-conscious, green entrepreneurship... or participate in contests at schools The children will realize that what they are doing, maybe tiny, does matter Through this project I expect that with this knowledge comes love, and with love comes the incentive, children will defend nature against the growing trend of destruction Furthermore, from a child, community awareness messages will pass to his or her parents Climate change is a problem... enrich their knowledge of the environment Nowadays kids know more about cyberspace than the real surrounding world, then a field trip per month can provide them with hands-on education of the great outdoors Once they know how a tree grows or how birds build their nests, I feel certain that they will fall in love with these natural marvels Additionally, an Environment Week per year will be the opportunity... people, the next generation, we feel that we have the most at stake yet a power to make changes The task is huge but with clear objectives and a team attitude, we will make it achievable Now I am 22 Time is passing When I am 70 or so, there will be a lot of greenery in front of my house There will be shade for children to play in, fresh air for people to breathe, pedestrian areas with green exchange... imposing rules and regulations to make companies more eco-conscious, green entrepreneurship will even more thrive To engage students from all walks of life to help us spread the foregoing initiatives, what need to be done is building a strong network of young activists We provide ideas and resources to help students run projects and promote practical solutions to climate change in their own communities . WHAT TIME HAS SHOWED ME When I was 10, I read an article about the meltdown of icebergs and glaciers in the North Pole and thought that the so-called global warming was so distant and somehow. other locations. Time has passed. I came to realize that the adverse impacts of climate change have become more obvious and irreversible, sweeping through every single nation. My homeland is no. the cherry trees come alive in their explosion of pink, we all know it is time for us to celebrate our Lunar New Year, or Tet as we usually call, which often falls some time between the end