Yuki Wong, Long Road Sixth Form College

You do not need me to tell you our planet is running out of time. So now we need to make some changes to save our planet.

Firstly, our planet has fewer trees than in the last century. According to the UN, Food and Agricultural organizations' report on the world’s Forests 2020, equates to approximately 3.9 billion trees were removed in the past 100 years, especially the forests in the Amazon. By the year 2018, 17% of the Amazon Forest was reported as having been lost due to deforestation. That means we need to take some action to protect our planet. On the other hand, our planet still has some problems. The biggest of which is the global warming situation, which makes less food and more diseases, because the earth has more desert, people cannot make food to eat or to sell to other countries. Why is our planet becoming so much worse? The main reason is people around the world eat more meat because peoples’ quality of life is better than before.

Secondly, what can we do for our planet? We can respect and protect green spaces because green spaces are important. They absorb carbon dioxide and associate it with lower air pollution. People can eat less meat and dairy products. Avoiding meat and dairy products is one of the biggest ways to reduce the environmental impact on the planet. Eat fewer or smaller portions of meat, especially red meat, which has the largest environmental impact and reduces dairy products or switch them for non-dairy alternatives. Listen to me! People can try to choose fresh, seasonal produce that is grown locally to help reduce the carbon emissions from transportation, preservation and prolonged refrigeration. That is helping our planet, your action is important to our planet. You should understand that we can leave the car at home because cars contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Walking and cycling are more enjoyable and have physical and metal healthy benefits, imagine the fresh air in your lungs and on your cheeks bracing you for a productive day at college- so much nicer than being stuck in the traffic- to think of the money saved! Also, for longer journeys we can use public transport or try car sharing schemes.

Furthermore, if we did not do all this, what might happen to our planet? This is a big problem we need to think about. There will be many consequences to the future generation. Therefore, extreme temperature leaves many families living in poverty with less food, less clean water, lower incomes, and worsening health. The children’s immune systems are still developing, leaving their rapidly growing bodies more sensitive to disease and pollution. This would be a worse situation to our children and our future generations. If our future generations do not have a good environment, how can they have a better future? How can they make their dreams come true? Listen to me! Because of extreme events, it would destroy homes and schools, you need to understand that droughts and flooding also destroy crops and cut access to clean water, this would make our children get into a worse situation.

Finally, I urge you to listen to me that the problems that have happened on our planet are urgent. The people around us like to say that there is no problem we can’t solve. But now you can see all the terrible situations on our planet. So, we need to save our planet and our future generations, it is not just my duty, it is our duty- we need to save our planet together! I know that we can do it. And now it is time for us to solve all the problems together!