Huyen Nguyen (Mary)'s Letter

To the future generation,

First of all, I would like to apologise, on behalf of our current generation, for neglecting the impacts of climate change and thinking selfishly about our own lives.
“We don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”
By Kerin Ord, Global Sector Lead for Education

The earth’s natural resources are limited and according to the Green Theorists, human beings have to stop economic development activities and change the current political system in order to save the planet. In fact, we have exceeded the level of Loss of biosphere integrity as one of the nine planetary boundaries (Stockholm Resilience Centre), in which human beings and the ecosystems can operate normally. Moreover, the UK has lost almost half of its biodiversity and wildlife due to the extensive farming and industrialisation during the past decades, ranking at the bottom of the world’s 10%, even lower than the G7 nations. This is an alarming situation, since all the elements of the planet are dependent on each other in terms of oxygen, carbon, and water. Most of our food and medical products are made from natural ingredients. Trees and woodland help to prevent negative consequences of climate change such as landslide, erosion and flooding, providing us with shadow, greenery to reduce heat island effect and cool down the air during summer. At the same time, the nature brings economic benefits for the real estate and tourism fields.

The UK has witnessed more hot days than before, and the recorded temperature was nearly 40 degrees in some places last year 2022 (BBC), causing increased faint, dehydration, dizziness and headache, even increased mortality rate. Floods are occurring in all over the world, especially the coastal countries and poorer countries with little financial budget for early warning system and climate resilient infrastructure. As a result, floods have destroyed local infrastructure, properties, houses and push the local families into harder conditions without clean water and food source. Moreover, heatwaves, sea-level rise, drought and salinity intrusion are all here, affecting our daily lives. Droughts cause the interruption of the food supply chain around the world, and it is not a surprising fact that the food that we are consuming now is not coming from our country but from Brazil, Canada, Japan, USA, Thailand, Morocco, South Africa and elsewhere. If this chain is disrupted, I am sorry to say that our future generation may struggle for everyday meals with the shortage of food.

With this urgent situation, I would like the government and the whole community to take immediate actions together in order to save our planet – the place we call home by reuse, reduce and recycle as much as possible, limited use or removal of plastic bags in our daily lives, protect the environment and the habitat, diversify renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuel, which directly contributes to the increased GHG emissions, enforce the law and regulations on biodiversity conservation, promote green growth and integrate climate change scenarios in land-use planning as well as masterplans of the cities and counties; at the same time, build local resilience by capacity building training, organise campaigns to raise awareness about resilience to ensure a more sustainable future for our next generation!

Together we can save the planet!
Best regards,
Huyen Nguyen (Mary)