What is the impact of the devastating effects of pollution on our health?

 

 

Risks deriving from pollution are numerous because the latter affects the whole environment, from water to the soils, and because it creates new challenges. Those ravages were caused by men who are destroying ecosystems and forests, prompting climate change and turning water into non-drinkable water. Indeed, climate change makes harvest unpredictable not only in terms of productivity, possibly causing populations’ malnutrition but also in terms of quality. Our health can thus be affected by pollution in different ways. Air pollution create respiratory illnesses like asthma, and with global warming, some illnesses appear at heights never seen before, like for example, malaria in Bolivia at hundreds of meters high. However, who are to be blamed for those ravages? Multinationals which keep on producing? States which do not manage to reduce their level of greenhouse gas emissions? Or people who still consume products responsible for environment degradation? Instead of holding any of them responsible for this, it would be more interesting to find how every actor of public life can act in order to reduce the risks deriving from pollution. Therefore, the goal of this debate is to find solutions to fight risks linked to global warming, focussing on risks affecting our health and discussing what everyone can do at their level.

 

Is there any compatibility between the protection of the environment and the eradication of hunger in the world? Is there any space for our health in this duality?

 

This is a question which takes every time more intensity, especially with the increase of the population. Indeed, we have to find solutions to produce enough food to avoid the death of people from hunger. Various solutions already exist such as the intensive agriculture. This kind of agriculture allows higher yield, but it doesn’t take care of the environment because it generates high levels of pollution and contribute to the destruction of the ecosystem located all around cultivated lands, as well as it uses toxic substances for our health. But if one gives the priority to the environment with the technique of the organic agriculture, weaker yields won’t be enough to feed the humankind, and the high price of the products won’t allow an access for everybody. The case of Genetically Modified Organism also seems to demonstrate the fact that the eradication of the hunger can only be realized by the sacrifice of the protection of the Earth: on one hand, these techniques create serious public health problems and ruin the environmental equilibrium between the fauna and flora of the ecosystem. But on the other hand, GMOs have a better resistance to various plagues (extreme climatic conditions, parasites…) which offers the possibility to get higher yields to supply the populations. Therefore, the two parameters seem to be irreconcilable. Are there solutions to this problem? A better distribution of the food between rich people who waste and poor people who are lacking of provisions? 

 

 

Can water become men’s worst enemy?

 

 

Latin America and its four great rivers represent one of the most important reserves of freshwater in the world. However, we happen to note that access to water is unequal. Moreover, with the pollution of companies, which produce and contaminate more and more since the industrialisation, and the illnesses caused by the latter, we can now ask ourselves if water can become our worst enemy while we need it to live and survive. The problems deriving from pollution affects Latin American waters and its populations who have to drink and use dirty waters to live. At the same time, desertification started to affect countries in the region like México.  The ill and unequal management of reserves can be seen in the data revealed by agencies like the UNICEF. Indeed, access to water sanitation is much lower in rural areas than in urban ones so that these data also reveal citizens’ inequality. Millions of Latin American people do not have access to freshwater and with privatization they have to face a new problem as this privatisation do not guarantee access to the whole population but a control by multinationals. This way, we can also discuss the idea according to which a water war is possible at the international level as this problem not only affects Latin America but also the whole world which is affected by climate change, rising waters, ocean acidification and melting ice.