On the occasion of World Environment Day, Nature Trust (Malta) calls on both the authorities and the public to make greater efforts to reduce CO2 emissions and give their input for the climate change problem in our planet.

Malta as a country still lacks behind in its efforts despite being the champion years back in bringing this issue to light at the United Nations. Our Islands still depend heavily of fossel fuel and renewable sources are still limited in numbers.

Today, the Maltese Islands are still without a national strategy for renewable energy. Already, years have been lost where research could have established our way forward.

Furthermore, despite that most of our new roads have large pedestrian areas, no plans were made for bicycle lanes. Where such lanes exist they often are a hazard to the cyclist. On a parallel level the reform of the public transport has still not been looked into and today our public transport is still contributing to pollution and considered unreliable by the public.

On the other hand the public still takes for granted energy production where we continue to see trends towards more energy intensive utilities, access lights, water wastage and illegal boreholes.

As part of its education campaign through the ekoskola programme, this year Nature Trust participated in the activities of schumman day. One of its activities was a project where participating schools participated in an exercise which was carried out over five days with the first 4 days he electricity readings were taken by the students and on the last day (9th May) the electricity was suspended for 1 hour in each school and readings taken again

As far as electricity was concerned, the difference in the number of units consumed on Friday 9th , when compared to the average of the other four days, was significant.

This exercise not only created awareness but reached the objectives in showing that checking one's use of energy resources not only helps, but, can be vital to protect our environment

The relevant data collected was the follows:

ELECTRICITY

Total daily consumption of consumption in kWh (units)

Monday 3300.6 Tuesday 3258.2 Wednesday 3336.6 Thursday 3355.8

Average consumption for the four days: 3316.3 Total consumption for Friday 2723.9

Total saved in 1hour 592.4 kWh (units)

If we calculate that in Malta every unit of power generated lets off into the atmosphere close to 880g of toxic gases mainly CO2, we can safely conclude that thanks to the exercise there are 528 kg of these gases less in our air. This shows that with our little actions - collectively we can contribute a lot.

Nature Trust (Malta)