Earth Day is celebrated every year on April 22. The event is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the world's natural environment.
On this day, people usually wear green clothes to show how much they appreciate and care about the environment. We learn about nature and how and why we should care for it and keep it clean. We also learn how much nature needs protection.
At my school — Raffles International School South Campus — we celebrated it by planting trees on our campus as part of the Billion Tree Campaign of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
We also had two guests who spoke on how to turn household waste into fertilisers. We watched videos of activities we have been doing that helped the environment, such as the fun run, field trips and recycled fashion show.
For the fun run, we involved people to sponsor us and they gave us money for every lap that we ran. This money was given to the school to buy recycling bins — we have now stopped using plastic cups for drinking water from the dispenser.
Similarly, through these initiatives, we realised how trees need carbon dioxide from us to live and we need oxygen from the trees to live. Hence, we should stop cutting down trees. We should also use less electricity on Earth Day because less electricity means less use of resources from the Earth.
On Earth Day we also talked about how we can save parts of nature, like trees, which are the main habitat for animals. By cutting trees, we are eradicating their habitat and they will gradually become extinct.
Earth Day is also a day to remember how our lives will be affected if we do not take care of our planet. We must learn to be careful in all we do right now so that our future is secure.
— The reader is a grade 5 pupil of Raffles International, South Campus, Dubai
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