research on environment day

World Environment Day

The United Nations designated 5 June as World Environment Day to highlight that the protection and health of the environment is a major issue, which affects the well-being of peoples and economic development throughout the world. The celebration of this day provides us with an opportunity to broaden the basis for an enlightened opinion and responsible conduct by individuals, enterprises and communities in preserving and enhancing the environment. 

The year 1972 marked a turning point in the development of international environmental politics, with the first major conference on environmental issues, known as the  Conference on the Human Environment , or the Stockholm Conference. Later that year, on 15 December, the General Assembly adopted a resolution ( A/RES/2994 (XXVII) ) designating June 5 as World Environment Day and urging "Governments and the organizations in the United Nations system to undertake on that day every year world-wide activities reaffirming their concern for the preservation and enhancement of the environment, with a view to deepening environmental awareness."

"As 2021 marks the beginning of United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, led jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and with which UNESCO is closely associated, the formidable reservoir of experience accumulated in our biosphere reserves will now be of service to the world."

UNESCO's work on environmental issues

UNESCO has an important track record in advancing ecological sciences through pioneering work on ecosystems, biosphere reserves, capacity building, scientific assessments and policy briefs to assist decision-makers in managing natural resources sustainably. UNESCO mobilizes the knowledge, know-how and practices of local communities and indigenous peoples to support their inclusion in environmental decision-making. Its World Network of Biosphere Reserves demonstrate ways to safeguard natural ecosystems and biodiversity through science, education and participatory approaches while promoting innovative economic development that is environmentally sustainable and socially and culturally appropriate.

"UNESCO will be responsible for the "Humans in Nature" panel, which will expand and extend the avenues that have been explored for the past 50 years in our biosphere reserves in order to prevent the degradation of ecosystems worldwide."

What UNESCO does for Environmental Protection

Message from Shamila Nair-Bedouelle, Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences of UNESCO

With its unique designated sites, UNESCO has been a leader in promoting in-situ solutions to the global challenges of terrestrial, coastal, and marine biodiversity loss.

UNESCO’s strategy for biodiversity is implemented in its designated sites. Over 10 million km², roughly 6% of the earth’s landmass, is already under one or more UNESCO designation, through its 1,121 World Heritage sites (including 252 natural and mixed sites and 114 cultural landscapes), its 714 Biosphere Reserves and its 161 Global Geoparks. UNESCO is also about the soft power to convene diverse interests, unite diverse cultures and emphasize shared human values. UNESCO believes that it is possible to transform mind sets to achieve sufficient momentum to bring change in this critically important  UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration .

Conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity: UNESCO designated sites

"Attacks on nature are contributing to the health crisis."

On the occasion of the International Day for Biological Diversity, Friday 22 May, Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, Jane Goodall, a primatologist famous for her studies on chimpanzees and ambassador for the Great Apes Survival Partnership launched by the United Nations, remind us that the global COVID-19 crisis must not make us forget to defend our planet's flora and fauna.

• Article on the Figaro website
• Read the full article
• Great apes in danger (COVID19)

Good Practices

Search the United Nations

• UN Observances

Solutions to plastic pollution

More than 400 million tonnes of plastic is produced every year worldwide, half of which is designed to be used only once. Of that, less than 10 per cent is recycled.

An estimated 19-23 million tonnes end up in lakes, rivers and seas annually. That is approximately the weight of 2,200 Eiffel Towers all together.

Microplastics – tiny plastic particles up to 5mm in diameter – find their way into food, water and air. It is estimated that each person on the planet consumes more than 50,000 plastic particles per year –and many more if inhalation is considered.

Discarded or burnt single-use plastic harms human health and biodiversity and pollutes every ecosystem from mountain tops to the ocean floor.

With available science and solutions to tackle the problem, governments, companies and other stakeholders must scale up and speed actions to solve this crisis.

This underscores the importance of this World Environment Day in mobilizing transformative action from every corner of the world.

#OnlyOneEarth Practical Guide

UNEP has published a practical guide outlining some of the collective, transformative actions that governments, cities, businesses, organizations and individuals can take to protect and restore our planet.

Fifty years celebrating World Environment Day

Led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and held annually on 5 June since 1973, World Environment Day is the largest global platform for environmental public outreach and is celebrated by millions of people across the world. In 2023, it is hosted by Côte D'Ivoire.

Why take part?

Time is running out, and nature is in emergency mode. To keep global warming below 1.5°C this century, we must halve annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Without action, exposure to air pollution beyond safe guidelines will increase by 50 per cent within the decade and plastic waste flowing into aquatic ecosystems will nearly triple by 2040.

We need urgent action to address these pressing issues.

2020 has been referred to as a "Nature Super Year" and must be the year where we turn the tide on deforestation and forestry loss. Secretary-General's Message

Did you know?

• Some 11 million tonnes of plastic waste flow annually into oceans. This may triple by 2040.
• More than 800 marine and coastal species are affected by this pollution through ingestion, entanglement, and other dangers.
• A shift to a circular economy can reduce the volume of plastics entering oceans by over 80 per cent by 2040; reduce virgin plastic production by 55 per cent; save governments US$70 billion by 2040; reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent; and create 700,000 additional jobs – mainly in the global south.

Source: UNEP 2023

Get involved!

Live updates of hundreds of global activities

Tune in to the live updates of activities taking place around the world, featuring stories, events with high level speakers, report launches, social and videos.

International Agreement

Faith in a global agreement to combat plastic pollution by 2024

Last year, 175 UN Member States endorsed a historic resolution to end plastic pollution and forge an international legally binding agreement that will be ready by the end of 2024. This is the most significant environmental multilateral deal since the Paris accord. It is an insurance policy for this generation and future ones, so they may live with plastic and not be doomed by it.

Related links

• UN Environment Programme
• Act now speak up
• Beat plastic pollution
• Breathe life challenge
• UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration
• One Planet Network
• Cities with nature
• Sustainable finance
• Measuring progress on the SDGS

#BeatPlasticPollution

Join the #BeatPlasticPollution movement through the official website of World Environment Day 2023. You can access more interesting information, the actions you can carry out to contribute, as well as a large number of materials to promote the movement through social media. Every performance, no matter how small, matters.

From pollution to solution

What do the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana trench, and the highest mountain peak in the world, Mt. Everest, have in common? Despite being among the planet's most inaccessible environments, they both contain tiny pieces of plastic from human activities miles away. Discover in this visual report the problem of garbage in the oceans. More interactive and visual stories here .

Plastic, a danger for climate change

Plastic is predominantly produced from oil and gas, both of which are fossil fuels. The more plastic we make, the more fossil fuel is required, the more we intensify the climate crisis. Also, plastic products create greenhouse gas emissions across their whole lifecycle. If no action is taken, greenhouse gas emissions caused by plastic could account for 19% of the Paris Agreement's total allowable emissions in 2040 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Read more about climate change .

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS. A lock ( Lock Locked padlock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

World Environment Day: What does the future hold for Earth's ecosystems?

Find related stories on NSF's Long-Term Ecological Research Program .

Any science may be likened to a river. It has its obscure and unpretentious beginning; its quiet stretches as well as its rapids; its periods of drought as well as of fullness. It gathers momentum with the work of many investigators and as it is fed by other streams of thought. - Carl Swanson, Biologist

How healthy will Earth's ecosystems be in 2027, 2067 and beyond? It's an important question to ask, especially on World Environment Day, June 5.

To find answers, scientists affiliated with the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network came together this spring at an NSF LTER mini-symposium .

"LTER research provides a long time period of study so relationships among ecological components can be understood, ecological changes can be documented, and strategies to react to these changes developed and tested," Rick Murray, director of NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences, said at the mini-symposium.

In deserts and lakes, along coasts, and in northern forests and arctic tundra, researchers at NSF LTER sites study the nature of ecosystem change, along the way discovering which factors lead to ecosystem recovery -- and which can lead to irreversible loss.

While ecosystems from coast to coast are showing signs of pressure, there's hope amid the concerns: long-term research demonstrates that ecosystems benefit from protection and restoration efforts based in good science.

"As ecosystems are subjected to increasing environmental changes, we need to understand general scientific principles to predict how these systems will react -- why some are resilient and others not as much," Paula Mabee, director of NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, said at the mini-symposium. "The science NSF funds at LTER sites gives us exactly this knowledge."

To add to that knowledge, NSF recently established three new LTER sites -- the Northeast U.S. Shelf LTER and Northern Gulf of Alaska LTER sites , and the Beaufort Sea Lagoons LTER site -- bringing the total number of NSF LTER sites to 28.

Ecosystems and human health

"We rely on ecosystems for many services that are critical to human health and well-being, yet these systems are increasingly changing in fundamental and unpredictable ways," said Peter Groffman of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study and Hubbard Brook LTER sites and chair of the LTER Science Council, a group that coordinates research activities in the LTER Network. "There is a critical need to understand the nature of these changes so we can predict, prevent, mitigate and adapt to them."

The LTER Network, Groffman stated, is doing just that. With some 2,300 investigators, more than 5,900 public datasets, and 16,000 published journal articles, LTER scientists use long-term research to address some of the most difficult questions in fields such as ecology, hydrology and oceanography.

How U.S. residents tend their lawns -- those icons of suburban and urban America -- offers an example.

"Lawns not only cover a larger extent of land than any other irrigated 'crop' in the U.S., but are on track to expand in the coming decades," Groffman said. Whether, and how much, property owners treat lawns with fertilizers containing nitrogen and phosphorus is important, he said. When lawn runoff containing these elements flows into rivers, ultimately reaching lakes or the sea, it often produces toxic blooms of algae and degrades water quality.

"The future of many aquatic ecosystems is rooted right in our backyards," Groffman said.

Beyond desertification

"Ecosystem change is inevitable," said Brandon Bestelmeyer of the Jornada LTER site in New Mexico. "Our challenge is to direct that change along the most desirable path available."

Drylands, including those at Jornada, evoke images of desolate, scorched, uninhabitable deserts. But arid and semi-arid lands like the Chihuahuan Desert, where the Jornada site is located, are complex ecosystems made up of grasses, shrubs, agricultural fields and urban-dwelling plants and animals, including people.

Many dryland landscapes have gone through marked changes in vegetation structure and ecosystem processes over the past 150 years. Explanations for these changes include overgrazing by livestock, drought, fewer natural fires, changes in atmospheric chemistry, and changes in small mammal populations.

"We need to look toward what will come next," said Bestelmeyer, "and understand what actions we can take now to improve ecosystem services for current and future stakeholders."

Fire in a warming Arctic

"Arctic ecosystems are undergoing rapid and surprising changes," said Michelle Mack of Alaska's Bonanza Creek and Arctic LTER sites. "Our job is to try to understand when ecosystems will recover, and when they will shift to new states."

Mack studies ecosystem resilience to the wildfires that have recently swept through parts of the Bonanza Creek and Arctic sites.

"With warmer and drier weather in the Arctic, wildfires are becoming more frequent," Mack said. "At Bonanza Creek, fires have been common for the past 10,000 years, but fires at the Arctic site are a new disturbance."

Among the conclusions: in boreal forests like those at Bonanza Creek, "severe fires triggered a shift from coniferous to deciduous tree dominance," said Mack.

In the Arctic site's tundra, deep soils were protected from the effects of burning. The intact vegetation led to rapid ecosystem recovery after the fire.

"The fires were unique opportunities to study these events," Mack said.

Where to store carbon?

"We live in a time of rapid ecosystem change," stated Karen McGlathery of the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER site. "Our challenge is to understand what drives these changes and their consequences so we can make decisions that lead to the most desirable future."

Seagrasses, for example, are a vital part of the solution to high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and resulting climate change, researchers at the Virginia Coast Reserve site have found. Like all plants, seagrasses "breathe out" oxygen and "breathe in" carbon dioxide.

"A remarkable thing about seagrass meadows is that they can effectively and rapidly store that carbon," McGlathery said.

Each year, seagrass meadows can sequester up to twice as much carbon as the world's temperate and tropical rainforests, yet they rank among the world's most threatened ecosystems, according to McGlathery. About one-third of Earth's seagrass meadows have been lost.

Virginia Coast Reserve scientists are working to build back these "carbon pools" through seagrass restoration efforts.

"Doing this where ocean temperatures are less extreme [warm] makes these meadows more resilient to climate change in the future," McGlathery said.

Acid rain: Scourge of the past?

"Ecosystems are complex and dynamic," stated Charles Driscoll of the Hubbard Brook LTER site in New Hampshire. "We hope to understand, project and mitigate their responses to our activities."

Take, for example, acid rain. It began in the 1950s when Midwest coal plants spewed sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the air, turning clouds -- and rain and snow -- acidic.

As acid rain fell, it leached calcium and magnesium from soils and robbed plants of important nutrients. New England's sugar maples were among the trees affected.

With stricter air quality regulations imposed in 1970 and strengthened in 1990, acid rain lessened, but its legacy remains, Driscoll said.

Today, acid rain is greatly reduced, Driscoll said, approaching levels likely not seen for the past 100 years. However, the soil calcium sugar maples depend on has been slow to respond.

"So acid rain will be with us for some time, and sugar maples are unlikely to recover anytime soon," Driscoll said.

On the good news side, he said, "there's evidence that red spruce trees, and some animals in lakes and rivers, are among the species that are recovering."

Plausible freshwater futures

"While humans impart widely publicized change to ecosystems, people remain unsure or unaware of how their individual footprints on the planet can impact the quality of life for themselves or someone they have never met," said Christopher Kucharik of the North Temperate Lakes LTER site in Wisconsin.

"In particular, how do climate, social-ecological interactions, land use and cover, and ecological processes act in concert to shape the past, present, and future of lake districts?" Kucharik asked.

For answers, scientists are looking to Wisconsin's Yahara watershed. The Yahara, which includes the twin lakes of Mendota and Monona in the city of Madison, provides the region with ecosystem services such as water quality and flood protection.

Stresses on the Yahara watershed are typical of many agricultural landscapes.

"Nitrogen from agriculture contaminates groundwater, and phosphorus from non-point, diffuse runoff is greater than that in pre-farming days," Kucharik said. Phosphorus pollution from fertilizer and other sources, he believes, is fast becoming the Yahara's public enemy number one.

"But we have the opportunity to change agriculture and urban management practices while the Yahara watershed is still relatively healthy," Kucharik said. "Let's not wait until it's beyond repair."

Research areas

Explainer: What is World Environment Day?

Millions of people from across the world participate in World Environment Day Image:  Unsplash/Matthew Smith

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Douglas Broom

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} Climate Change is affecting economies, industries and global issues

.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;color:#2846F8;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{font-size:1.125rem;}} Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:, climate change.

• Humanity is using up the world’s resources faster than they can naturally recover, says the UN.
• World Environment Day, on 5 June, is a global event to celebrate and encourage action on the climate crisis.
• The cost of climate adaptation in developing nations is now estimated to be $500 billion a year.
• CO2 emissions will need to halve by 2030, the UN says, to avoid temperature rises of 2.7C and higher by the end of the century.

We’re running out of time to save our planet - using up the equivalent of 1.6 Earths to maintain our current way of life - and nature simply cannot keep up with our demands. That’s the message from the organizers of World Environment Day 2022 on 5 June.

What is World Environment Day?

First held in 1973, World Environment Day is described as “a global platform for inspiring positive change” by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the organization that created it.

It is now the largest global environmental event, with millions of people in more than 150 countries participating. The idea is to engage “governments, businesses, civil society, schools, celebrities, cities and communities [in] raising awareness and celebrating environmental action”.

The 2022 World Environment Day, hosted by Sweden, campaigns for “collective, transformative action on a global scale to celebrate, protect and restore our planet”, encouraging everyone, everywhere, to live sustainably and take action on the climate crisis.

This year marks 50 years since the first global environment summit. The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm led to the founding of UNEP .

UNEP says that, despite a raft of climate agreements, progress towards halting climate change is still too slow and individuals and civil society must play a key role in raising awareness and urging governments and the private sector to make large-scale changes.

Closing the adaptation gap

The cost of climate change is rising, says Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP, as is the gap between what is being spent to adapt to climate change and what is needed . As recently as 2014, the cost of adaptation in developing nations was estimated at $100 billion a year . Today that figure is $500 billion .

To limit the rise in global temperature, which is driving climate change, to 1.5C, worldwide CO2 emissions will need to halve by 2030, UNEP says. If there is no change in current plans, temperatures will be 2.7C higher by the end of the century .

Climate change poses an urgent threat demanding decisive action. Communities around the world are already experiencing increased climate impacts, from droughts to floods to rising seas. The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report continues to rank these environmental threats at the top of the list.

To limit global temperature rise to well below 2°C and as close as possible to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, it is essential that businesses, policy-makers, and civil society advance comprehensive near- and long-term climate actions in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The World Economic Forum's Climate Initiative supports the scaling and acceleration of global climate action through public and private-sector collaboration. The Initiative works across several workstreams to develop and implement inclusive and ambitious solutions.

This includes the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, a global network of business leaders from various industries developing cost-effective solutions to transitioning to a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy. CEOs use their position and influence with policy-makers and corporate partners to accelerate the transition and realize the economic benefits of delivering a safer climate.

Contact us to get involved.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2022 rated climate action failure as the most severe risk facing the world over the next decade, a risk it said had been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

What is Earth Overshoot Day?

Another way of measuring how humanity is using Earth’s resources faster than they can be replaced is Earth Overshoot Day , the day in the year on which the world stops living sustainably. The earlier in the year it falls, the more unsustainable life on Earth becomes.

It is calculated annually by the Global Footprint Network (GFN) by dividing the amount of resources Earth can generate in a given year by human demand for resources in that year. In 2021 it was 29 July. The global slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic pushed 2020 Earth Overshoot Day back to 22 August. The date for 2022 has yet to be calculated.

For World Environment Day 2022, the theme #OnlyOneEarth, which was used at the first global environment gathering in 1972, is being revived. Sweden will also host an international conference called Stockholm+50 to accelerate climate action.

Across the world, events are planned from seminars and concerts to beach and countryside clean-ups. Brussels will be staging a city environment festival , while Mumbai will stage the Green Ride Cyclothon to promote a more sustainable way to travel.

Have you read?

Climate and nature action – together in partnership for a better future, earth day 2022: 3 amazing projects that are tackling climate change with trees, the staggering figures for this year's earth overshoot day, don't miss any update on this topic.

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Related topics:

The agenda .chakra .wef-n7bacu{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-weight:400;} weekly.

A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

.chakra .wef-1dtnjt5{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;} More on Climate Change .chakra .wef-17xejub{-webkit-flex:1;-ms-flex:1;flex:1;justify-self:stretch;-webkit-align-self:stretch;-ms-flex-item-align:stretch;align-self:stretch;} .chakra .wef-nr1rr4{display:-webkit-inline-box;display:-webkit-inline-flex;display:-ms-inline-flexbox;display:inline-flex;white-space:normal;vertical-align:middle;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:0.75rem;border-radius:0.25rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;line-height:1.2;-webkit-letter-spacing:1.25px;-moz-letter-spacing:1.25px;-ms-letter-spacing:1.25px;letter-spacing:1.25px;background:none;padding:0px;color:#B3B3B3;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;box-decoration-break:clone;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;}@media screen and (min-width:37.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:0.875rem;}}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:1rem;}} See all

Weekend Reads: Funding AI’s future, imperfect environmentalists and Jane Goodall’s lessons on hope

Linda Lacina

April 5, 2024

How imperfect environmentalists can drive action on climate change 

Sheila M Morovati

April 4, 2024

75 years of NATO: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization explained

Kate Whiting

Water inequity lessons from Ethiopia's Tana Watershed 

Eliza L. Swedenborg

April 3, 2024

4 lessons from Jane Goodall as the renowned primatologist turns 90

Gareth Francis

5 ways CRISPR gene editing is shaping the future of food and health

Douglas Broom

World Environment Day, held annually on 5 June, brings together millions of people from across the globe, engaging them in the effort to protect and restore the Earth. This year marks the event’s 50th anniversary.

The community.

World Environment Day is a global platform for inspiring positive change. People from more than 150 countries participate in this United Nations international day, which celebrates environmental action and the power of governments, businesses and individuals to create a more sustainable world. The event has been led by the United Nations Environment Programme ( UNEP ) since its inception in 1973.

World Environment Day puts a global spotlight on the pressing environmental challenges of our times. This UN international day has become the largest global platform for environmental outreach, with millions of people from across the world engaging to protect the planet.

2023, Côte d’Ivoire | Solutions to Plastic Pollution #BeatPlasticPollution 

In 2023 , World Environment Day focused on showcasing solutions to plastic pollution, underscoring the need for a comprehensive “whole-of-society approach” to combatting the plastic pollution crisis. Following the unanimous passing of the  historic resolution  to establish an  Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC)  to develop a legally binding global instrument to end plastic pollution, this World Environment Day served as a reminder that  solutions are available , but we need stronger and more concerted action to rethink how humanity designs, produces, consumes, and disposes of plastics, products, and packaging to  #BeatPlasticPollution . 

2022, Sweden | Only One Earth #OnlyOneEarth

World Environment Day paid homage to the 50th anniversary of what is considered the world’s first environmental summit, the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment . Like that gathering, it adopted the slogan “Only One Earth”, casting a spotlight on the pressing need to protect and restore humanity’s lone home. 

At the 2022 official event, host country Sweden pledged to stop issuing licenses for new coal, oil and natural gas extraction. More than 65 million people celebrated World Environment Day online.

2021, Pakistan | Ecosystem Restoration #GenerationRestoration

The focus was Ecosystem Restoration celebrated under the theme “ Reimagine. Recreate. Restore ”. Hosted by Pakistan, it cast a spotlight on how humanity has been exploiting the planet's ecosystems and called for a concerted global effort to repair the damage that has been done. Every three seconds, the world loses enough forest to cover a football pitch and, over the last century, half of all wetlands have been destroyed. 

2020, Colombia | Time for Nature #TimeForNature

In 2020 , the World Environment Day theme focused on biodiversity – a concern both urgent and existential. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis – caused by the rapid destruction of habitats – President of Colombia, Iván Duque Márquez, said “the time to act is now if we want to assure our present and our future.” Fourteen world leaders – including those from Colombia, Costa Rica, Finland, France and Seychelles – released a statement calling on governments worldwide to support a new global goal to protect at least 30 per cent of the planet’s land and ocean by 2030.

2019, People's Republic of China | Beat Air Pollution #BeatAirPollution

The theme was air pollution, a global emergency that causes around 7 million premature deaths every year. Hosted by China, President Xi Jinping stressed his country’s willingness to share its experience combating air pollution with other nations. China also launched its Air Quality Improvement Report (2013-2018) to showcase successful policies and reflect on lessons learned.

2018, India | Beat Plastic Pollution #BeatPlasticPollution

The 45th celebration of World Environment Day was under the theme “Beat Plastic Pollution.” Over 6,000 people gathered at Versova Beach in Mumbai to join UN Environment Champion of the Earth Afroz Shah in a beach clean-up, where they collected over 90,000 kg of plastic. The Indian government made a bold commitment to ban all single-use plastics—which makes up 70 per cent of marine litter—by 2022 and European Union lawmakers agreed on a ban by 2025.

2017, Canada | Connecting People to Nature – in the city and on the land, from the poles to the equator #ImWithNature

“I’m with nature” was the theme of World Environment Day 2017, which inspired more than 1,800 events, from tree-planting in Mumbai to ivory burning in Angola to a running race through Brazil’s Iguaçu National Park. In host country Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined UNEP’s Erik Solheim to connect with nature by paddling kayaks along the Niagara River.

2016, Angola | Zero Tolerance for the Illegal Wildlife Trade #WildForLife

The day was a springboard for #WildforLife, at the time UNEP’s biggest-ever digital campaign and a major push to counter international wildlife crime. Host country Angola promised to curb the trading of elephant ivory. China, a key destination for illegal wildlife products, subsequently pledged to close down its domestic ivory market.

2015, Italy | Seven Billion Dreams. One Planet. Consume with Care. #ConsumeWithCare

World Environment Day went viral. Celebrated under the theme “Seven Billion People. One Planet. Consume with Care,” it was the most popular subject on Twitter in more than 20 countries. 

2014, Barbados | Raise Your Voice, Not the Sea Level #ClimateChange

The theme “Raise Your Voice Not the Sea Level!” built awareness of the dangers facing island nations from climate change. The next year, small island states secured an agreement at the Paris climate talks to pursue the ambitious goal of limiting the increase in average global temperature to 1.5°C.

2013, Mongolia | Think.Eat.Save. Reduce Your Foodprint  #ThinkEatSave

The year’s theme was “Think.Eat.Save.” The campaign highlighted the environmental toll of food waste, empowering people to make informed choices to reduce the ecological impact of food production.

2012, Brazil | Green Economy: Does it Include You? #DoesItIncludeYou?

Twenty years after the Earth Summit, World Environment Day returned to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The theme “Green Economy: Does it Include You?” amplified UNEP’s efforts to create a more sustainable global financial order. The World Environment Day website posted more than 4.25 million visits, a new record at the time.

2011, India | Forests: Nature at Your Service

World Environment Day featured a friendly contest between actor Don Cheadle and entrepreneur Gisele Bündchen to see who can attract more social media followers. As part of the contest, Bündchen planted the first of 50,000 trees in Rio de Janeiro’s Grumari Municipal Park. People around the world registered more than 4,000 activities related to World Environment Day.

2010, Rwanda | Many Species. One Planet. One Future

World Environment Day’s Legacy Initiative raised more than US$85,000 for gorilla conservation and solar lighting in villages across host country, Rwanda. Voters in a global online competition chose names for several baby gorillas, spotlighting their threatened status during the International Year of Biodiversity.

2009, Mexico | Your Planet Needs You: Unite to Combat Climate Change

2008, new zealand | kick the habit towards a low carbon economy, 2007, norway | melting ice - a hot topic.

The theme “Melting Ice? – A Hot Topic”, marked the first of three consecutive years in which the day drew attention to climate change. It came just as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s  Fourth Assessment Report stated that warming of the climate was unequivocal.

2006, Algeria | Deserts and Desertification – Don’t Desert Drylands!

A decade after the UN Convention to Combat Desertification entered into force, World Environment Day delivered a reminder of the pressures on drylands when Algeria hosted the celebrations under the slogan “Deserts and Desertification – Don’t Desert Drylands!”

2005, United States of America | Green Cities: Plan for the Planet!

World Environment Day was held in North America for the first time, with San Francisco hosting hundreds of events around the theme “Green Cities: Plan for the Planet.” Held in the year the Kyoto Protocol came into force, the event included the participation of former United States of America Vice-President Al Gore and former Mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom.

2004, Spain | Wanted! Seas and Oceans - Dead or Alive?

2003, lebanon | water - two billion people are dying for it.

The main celebrations took place in Beirut, Lebanon, a first for West Asia. The theme of “Water – Two Billion People are Dying for It!” was chosen in support of the International Year of Fresh Water.

2002, People's Republic of China | Give Earth a Chance

2001, italy and cuba | connect with the world wide web of life.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan chose World Environment Day to launch the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, an unprecedented effort to map the health of the planet. Reflecting the theme “Connect with the World Wide Web of Life,” the international festivities took place across several cities: Torino, Italy; Havana, Cuba; Hue, Viet Nam; and Nairobi, Kenya.

2000, Australia | The Environment Millennium - Time to Act

UNEP launched a World Environment Day website, making it easy for people around the world to register their activities and build a sense of global community. The main events took place in Adelaide, Australia under the theme “The Environment Millennium – Time to Act,” ahead of the international summit that set out the Millennium Development Goals.

1999, Japan | Our Earth – Our Future – Just Save It!

1998, russian federation | for life on earth – save our seas.

World Environment Day highlighted threats to marine ecosystems for the first time, using the theme of “For Life on Earth – Save our Seas” in support of the International Year of the Ocean.

1997, Republic of Korea | For Life on Earth

1996, türkiye | our earth, our habitat, our home.

Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa received a posthumous Global 500 award during World Environment Day celebrations in Ankara, Türkiye. With the award, World Environment Day threw a spotlight on the link between human and environmental rights.

1995, South Africa | We the Peoples: United for the Global Environment

South Africa played host a year after Nelson Mandela became president. Mandela attended the celebrations, drawing huge international attention to environmental themes. A year earlier, the anti-apartheid leader used the day to declare Cape Town’s Table Mountain a “gift to the Earth” and proof of South Africa's commitment to protect biodiversity.

1994, United Kingdom | One Earth One Family

1993, people's republic of china | poverty and the environment – breaking the vicious circle.

China hosted World Environment Day in Beijing, raising environmental awareness in the world’s most populous nation, under the theme “Poverty and the Environment - Breaking the Vicious Circle.” The event returned to China in 2002, hosted by the city of Shenzhen.

1992, Brazil | Only One Earth, Care and Share

World Environment Day was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the UN Conference on Environment and Development, better known as the Earth Summit. Nations negotiated landmark treaties on climate change, desertification and biodiversity, and set the course for contemporary sustainable development.

1991, Sweden | Climate Change. Need for Global Partnership

1990, mexico | children and the environment, 1989, belgium | global warming; global warning.

A year after the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, celebrations hosted in Brussels, Belgium echoed mounting concern about global warming. The theme was revisited more than any other in subsequent World Environment Day campaigns.

1988, Thailand | When People Put the Environment First, Development Will Last

The main celebrations began to rotate around the globe, starting in Bangkok, Thailand. The theme of “When People Put the Environment First, Development Will Last” came a year after the Brundtland Report laid out its influential blueprint for sustainability.

1987, Kenya | Environment and Shelter: More Than A Roof

UNEP marked the day at its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, by presenting the first of its Global 500 awards to environmental champions including Wangari Maathai. The awards became a mainstay of World Environment Day celebrations through 2003.

1986, Canada | A Tree for Peace

The theme “A Tree for Peace” coincided with the International Year of Peace. Reflecting World Environment Day’s growing profile, political and religious leaders, including French President François Mitterrand, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, took part in a global ceremony by planting a tree and stressing the links between conflict and environmental destruction.

1985, Pakistan | Youth: Population and the Environment

1984, bangladesh | desertification, 1983, bangladesh | managing and disposing hazardous waste: acid rain and energy, 1982, bangladesh | ten years after stockholm (renewal of environmental concerns), 1981, bangladesh | ground water; toxic chemicals in human food chains.

The campaign drew attention to toxic chemicals in groundwater and food chains. The next year, UNEP’s Governing Council adopted the Montevideo Programme, setting priorities for global lawmaking that led to major international agreements restricting or eliminating an array of hazardous chemicals and pollutants.

1980, Bangladesh | A New Challenge for the New Decade: Development Without Destruction

1979, bangladesh | only one future for our children – development without destruction.

The theme “Only One Future for Our Children” coincided with the International Year of the Child. For the first time, World Environment Day echoed a UN-designated international year, a trend that grew as environmental problems rose up on the global agenda.

1978, Bangladesh | Development Without Destruction

1977, bangladesh | ozone layer environmental concern; lands loss and soil degradation.

UNEP used the day to highlight concern about the ozone layer, setting a trend for World Environment Day to generate vital early momentum on critical environmental issues. It took another 10 years to seal the landmark Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

1976, Canada | Water: Vital Resource for Life

1975, bangladesh | human settlements, 1974, united states of america | only one earth, 1973, switzerland | only one earth.

World Environment Day was celebrated for the first time with the slogan “Only One Earth.”

1972, Sweden | Stockholm Conference on Human Environment

The UN General Assembly designated 5 June as World Environment Day, marking the first day of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. Another resolution, adopted by the General Assembly the same day, led to the creation of UNEP.

World Environment Day: Understanding Environmental Programs Impact on Society Using Twitter Data Mining

• Original Research
• Open access
• Published: 16 June 2022
• Volume 164 , pages 263–284, ( 2022 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

• Enara Zarrabeitia-Bilbao   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2347-3885 1 ,
• Rosa-María Rio-Belver   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4244-9098 2 ,
• Izaskun Alvarez-Meaza   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2110-0719 1 &
• Itziar Martínez de Alegría-Mancisidor   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0731-3010 1  

2602 Accesses

7 Citations

2 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

Environmental sustainability awareness has encouraged the promotion of a number of environmental programs and initiatives and, accordingly, the use of social networks for the dissemination and support of these initiatives has grown significantly. Thus, the purpose of the work is to understand United Nations World Environment Day (WED) programs impact on the digital public debate using Twitter data mining. For that, an ad hoc methodology is designed to provide it to authorities and organizations that wish to analyze the impact of different initiatives or programs on society. All in all, the research carried out analyzes more than 400,000 tweets sent during the 2021 edition of the WED. The tweets have been processed using Big Data techniques and Social Network Analysis. The research reveals that the WED was a trending topic initiative that was discussed in positive terms, where collective sentiment was shown. The topics covered dealt with the event day and the different initiatives related to restoration of ecosystems. However, it is noted that: there is no coordinated action by the institutions, groups or individuals involved in the conversation and the initiative tends towards homophily; digital mobilization is mostly centered in the host country (Pakistan) and, above all, in the neighboring country (India) and, the conspicuous absence of the business sphere in the discussion.

Similar content being viewed by others

Social Impact Assessment: A Systematic Review of Literature

William Alomoto, Angels Niñerola & Laia Pié

A Confirmation Bias View on Social Media Induced Polarisation During Covid-19

Sachin Modgil, Rohit Kumar Singh, … Denis Dennehy

The Narrative Policy Framework: A Traveler’s Guide to Policy Stories

Caroline Schlaufer, Johanna Kuenzler, … Elizabeth A. Shanahan

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

For decades, politicians, social movements and media have been playing an essential role in the process of shaping public opinion (Mazzoleni, 2010 ). However, it is an undisputed fact that the advent of the Internet and digital social platforms have reconfigured the way in which public opinion is created, altering the roles traditionally assigned to politicians, media and social movements (Lesaca, 2015 ). With the irruption of new communication channels, social media platforms have become a fundamental pillar for the dissemination of messages and slogans and, above all, for social mobilization and the creation of a certain state of opinion (Carrasco-Polaino et al., 2017 ). All in all, nowadays, institutions, different types of groups or individuals make use of digital platforms to express their opinion and influence on different topics of discussion.

The use and expansion of the main digital social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram or Twitter (Statista, 2021 ) reinforce the idea that society is facing a form of socializing that has online interaction as one of its main supports. In this context, the microblogging social network Twitter stands out since it allows the massive exchange of interpersonal communication that can be captured, stored, represented and analyzed (Del-Fresno-García, 2014 ; Wu et al., 2011 ). Thus, Twitter has aroused great interest in the academic community due to, among other things, the type of conversation that takes place there, the impact it has had on different social movements that have emerged in recent years and the possibility of analyzing all of that (Alhindi et al., 2012 ; Edrington & Lee, 2018 ; Li et al., 2021 ).

In this context, a topic that has generated great interest within social networks in recent years has been the environment (Burak, 2017 ; Hendriks et al., 2016 ). The importance of the environment is obvious since all organisms obtain all the elements they need to live from the environment: from air and water, to shelter and food that allow them to grow, develop and obtain energy. Maintaining the balance of the environment is fundamental to sustaining life on Earth, as well we know (Concepto, 2021 ). However, the planet is suffering from a triple crisis: climate change, loss of biodiversity and pollution (UN, 2021 ). Thus, the importance of environmental sustainability awareness has encouraged the promotion of a number of environmental programs and initiatives.

Thereby, of late the use of social networks to disseminate and support different environmental initiatives has grown significantly. In this regard, the purpose of the work is to understand World Environment Day program impact on the digital public debate using Twitter data mining. Thus, a methodology designed ad hoc will be provided to those authorities and organizations that wish to analyze the impact of different initiatives or events on society.

2 World Environment Day Program

World Environment Day (WED) is a United Nations (UN) environmental initiative started back in 1974 and celebrated every year on June 5, with the participation of governments, businesses and citizens in an effort to address urgent environmental issues. The program aims to raise awareness and inspire actions on urgent issues: from marine pollution and climate change to sustainable consumption and wildlife crime. Hence, multiple activities take place in this multimedial event (WED, 2021 ). In many countries, this celebration is an opportunity to sign or ratify international conventions and to establish permanent governmental structures related to environmental management and economic planning. Over all, WED provides a global platform to inspire positive environmental changes.

Each year, WED is celebrated in a different country, where the official celebrations are held. For 2021, the host country was Pakistan. In addition, every year World Environment Day revolves around a specific theme. In this case, WED ( 2021 ) had as its theme ‘Ecosystem restoration’ with the slogan ‘Reimagine, Recreate, Restore’. In this regard, June 5, 2021 also marked the launch of the UN decade of Ecosystem Restoration, a ten-year global push to prevent, halt and reverse ecosystem degradation (WED, 2021 ).

All in all, under the premise of protecting and improving the environment and taking care of the health of the planet, WED has grown to be a popular and global initiative.

3 Literature Review and Related Work

In this section, we review previous works related to the use of Twitter as a tool for social research, in general, and for studying the environmental crisis that the planet is suffering, in particular.

3.1 Twitter as a Tool for Social Research

Since its launch in 2006, the microblogging platform Twitter has attracted increasing interest from different scientific fields. The first scientific studies related to Twitter appeared shortly after the launch of the platform, in the period from 2007 to 2008 (Cormode et al., 2010 ; Navas, 2018 ). These works, as expected, were descriptive and addressed basic characteristics of the tool (Java et al., 2007 ; Krishnamurthy et al., 2008 ). However, subsequently, in 2009, scientific studies began to focus on the content of tweets, and the first linguistic and semantic analyses were developed (Cormode et al., 2010 ; Navas, 2018 ); thus, the first works of content classification (Dann, 2010 ; Naaman et al., 2010 ; Pear-Analytics, 2009 ) and trend analysis were carried out (Cheong & Lee, 2009 ). Later, as of 2011, conversation definitely became the central activity of the scientific studies that took Twitter as a research tool. Scientific research shifted from a user and the tweet based perspective to one based on the interactions established between users (Navas, 2018 ).

Today, Twitter has become one of the virtual environments most conducive to the collection of large volumes of data at very fast speeds for subsequent data analysis through Social Network Analysis and Machine Learning techniques (Morales-i-Gras, 2020 ). Thus, Twitter is recognized as a leading channel in a variety of areas such as politics or business and, therefore, has taken a leading role in the scientific field of social sciences.

Several studies have analyzed political and current affair issues through Twitter. The different studies have focused on the analysis of the message senders and recipients, the political debate generated around Twitter, as well as the use of Twitter in electoral campaigns. In these works, Twitter is presented, usually, as a tool with a great functionality for both politicians and citizens (Campos-Domínguez, 2017 ; Marín-Dueñas et al., 2019 ). Furthermore, Twitter has had enormous impact on various well-known political and social mobilizations of recent years, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street or Me Too movements.

It also highlights the role of Twitter in business studies in terms of engagement or management strategy. Due to the emergence of social networks, organizations, both public and private, are no longer the only source of information about entities, brands or products. Thus, the communication process has ceased to be unidirectional to start the search for a continuous dialogue (Fernández-Gómez & Martín-Quevedo, 2018 ; Medina et al., 2018 ).

Likewise, the use of Twitter as a tool to predict social phenomena is recurrent in recent scientific researches. Though different machine learning techniques, successful works can be found in multiple contexts using Twitter for predictive tasks, such as: electoral or engagement predictions, stock market predictions or pandemic detection, among others (Coletto et al., 2015 ).

All in all, thanks to the data obtained from Twitter and the subsequent analysis of the information, it is possible to describe, explain, interpret and comprehend how and why social networks are used and which social effects they generate (Casero-Ripollés, 2018 ).

3.2 Environmental Crisis and Twitter Data Mining

There are many ways to analyze public opinion and the dynamics generated on environmental issues. However, the impact that social networks have on public perception and reaction of topics related to the environment is an established fact. Specifically, different studies have addressed issues of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss through Twitter data mining.

Climate change is the greatest environmental threat facing humanity and the consequences could be devastating if dependence on fossil fuels is not drastically reduced (Greenpeace, 2021 ). In this context, numerous conversations on this topic are taking place on Twitter and being analyzed by the scientific community. Recent studies show who is behind the different discussions (politicians, activists, business, NGOs, celebrities, etc.) and what the content of the tweets is. Likewise, events related to climate change have been analyzed to understand how the public focuses attention on aspects of climate change (Fownes et al., 2018 ).

The topic of pollution is another recurring issue in Twitter conversations and it is reflected in the different scientific studies carried out on the subject. The research studies gather information on pollution and analyze the impact that different types of pollution, such as air, noise or plastic pollution has on citizens (Juanals & Minel, 2018 ; Otero et al., 2021 ; Peplow et al., 2021 ).

In the case of biodiversity conversations on Twitter, this is a less popular topic within the scientific community. However, there are works seeking to obtain information on species through Twitter (Daume, 2016 ) as well as considering how narrowly focused advocacy on platforms like Twitter will contribute to effective global biodiversity conservation (Barrios-O’Neill, 2020 ).

In addition, previous works have analyzed the discussions generated on Twitter in different environmental campaigns or programs such as ‘Plastic Free July’ or previous WED years (specifically, 2015 and 2018) (Heidbreder et al., 2021 ; Pang & Law, 2017 ; Reyes-Menendez et al., 2018 ). These studies analyze the topics of conversation, the sentiment of the discussion and the visual rhetoric used, however, none of them makes an exhaustive analysis of the impact of environmental movements on virtual public debate.

Therefore, although there are many studies that analyze different critical environmental issues, none of them goes deeper into the analysis of the impact that a targeted or planned conversation, i.e., one that does not arise spontaneously (as is the case of an initiative such as WED) has on society in order to assess whether the objectives have been achieved, both in terms of content and the public that has participated in the discussion.

4 Research Questions and Methodology

This study is framed within the framework of Social Network Analysis, an analytical trend focused on identifying interaction patterns between actors, based on the use of Big Data.

Specifically, this research focuses on the interactions between Twitter users in relation to WED ( 2021 ). As previously mentioned, Twitter was chosen as data source because of the potential demonstrated by this social network for variety of domains and scientific fields including recent studies about environmental issues, in general, and about WED, in particular.

In summary, this research work proposes a unique methodological design, developed ad hoc to respond to different research questions based on the data collected from Twitter.

4.1 Research Questions

The purpose of the study is to understand World Environment Day program impact on the digital public debate using Twitter data mining, and the approach to the main objective has been carried out based on different research questions about WED ( 2021 ), namely:

RQ1 : What are the main characteristics of the overall digital conversation?

RQ2 : What does the overall conversation revolve around?

RQ3 : (a) Which are the main communities generated in the conversation? (b) What is the presence of governments, business and citizens? (c) What is the presence of the most polluting countries? (d) What is the behavior of the interactions in each community (e) What does the conversation revolve around in each community?

RQ4 : Who are the most influential players in the overall conversation?

4.2 Data Extraction and Analysis Method

The workflow followed for data extraction and data analysis is summarized in Fig.  1 .

Workflow of the scientific research

Data extraction and preparation

The first step in order to undertake the study was the extraction and preparation of the necessary data. In this regard, the social media used for data extraction was Twitter.

The sampling procedure adopted the criteria of data collection based on the content of the tweets: #WorldEnvironmentDay, the language used in the tweets: English, and the day of publication of the tweets: June 5, 2021.

For the collection of the tweets, the software used was T-Hoarder, an open source system that, based on Python language, is able to establish a connection with the Twitter API and retroactively download data and process it (Congosto et al., 2017 ; GitHub, 2021 ).

Subsequently, it was necessary to prepare data for further data analysis. The open source software used to clean, refine and extract the data was OpenRefine (OpenRefine, 2021 ) and Orange Data Mining (Ljubljana-University, 2021 ).

Data analysis

The exploratory and descriptive study was carried out in two stages. In the first stage, the overall digital conversation was analyzed (to answer RQ1, RQ2 and RQ3) and in the second stage, key players of the conversation were identified (to answer RQ4).

In order to answer this first question, first of all, the global network that contains the overall digital conversation about WED ( 2021 ) has been obtained. For that, once the tweets were obtained, a process of extracting mentions was carried out through the software OpenRefine to synthesize a network based on which users mention which users in the conversation itself. Thus, a graph will be obtained where each node represents a participant in the conversation (a Twitter user), and where each arc represents a Twitter mention type interaction (from one Twitter user to another Twitter user): a retweet, a direct response or an interpellation within a regular tweet.

In relation to the network obtained, information about the general morphology of the digital conversation was obtained to analyze its main characteristics. To this purpose different metrics (see Table 1 ) were calculated with the open source software Pajek (Mrvar & Batagelj, 2021 ) and Orange Data Mining.

The topic of the digital conversation was analyzed through semantic analysis, both through the most relevant words used in the conversations established between users of the social network, and through the hashtags or keywords used by the users to tag their messages. Thus, different thematic blocks of the digital conversation have been identified through the words used in the tweets and the framework of those blocks through the hashtags.

Hence, two networks were generated: the first one with the tweets and the most highlighted words (the 150 most relevant that appear in the tweets, obtained through TF-IDF, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency correction procedure), and the second one with the tweets and the most highlighted hashtags (the 150 that most frequently appear in the tweets). Afterwards, once the weakest relations have been removed, one graph of most relevant words and other graph of most relevant hashtags in the digital conversation based on how many tweets co-occur were generated (see Fig.  2 ).

Edges and nodes for most highlighted words and hashtags networks

The software Pajek was used to transform the two-mode network (when in the same network the nodes represent different ontological entities) into a single-mode network (when in the same network the nodes represent the same ontological entity) (see Fig.  2 ) and the software Ghepi was used for the visualization and study of the relationships between words and hashtags (Bastian et al., 2009 ).

To finish the overall digital conversation analysis, the main communities generated around WED ( 2021 ) were identified and analyzed.

Once the main communities have been identified (to answer question a ), to analyze each community, concretely, each main leaders (to answer questions b and c ), different global metrics (to answer question d ) and discussed topics (to answer question e ) have been studied.

The software used to identify communities was Pajek, concretely, by applying the Louvain Multi-Level algorithm (with 10 restarts) (Blondel et al., 2008 ). After that, the synthesized network and the detected communities were processed through Gephi for their visualization and analysis. The tool used to analyze what type of contents have been important in each community has been PowerQuery-Excel (Microsoft, 2021 ).

Finally, in the second stage, key players of the overall digital conversation were analyzed through Pajek and Node-level metrics (see Table 2 ).

5 Results and Discussion

Throughout June 5, 2021, on World Environment Day, a total of 415,121 tweets in English were sent out with the hashtag #WorldEnvironmentDay.

Moreover, considering that Twitter identifies trends in public opinion based on parameters such as the level of interaction with certain hashtags, it is worth noting that the hashtag #WorldEnvironmentDay was the most used hashtag worldwide for 7 consecutive hours and remained in the Top-10 hashtags for 10 consecutive hours. Furthermore, in the case of India, the Twitter users placed #WorldEnvironmentDay at the top of the ranking for 12 consecutive hours.

5.1 Overall Digital Conversation

The following three sections analyze the overall conversation around WED ( 2021 ).

5.1.1 Global Metrics Analysis [RQ1]

As an initial approach to the digital conversation, Fig.  3 shows the global network that contains the overall digital conversation and Table 3 shows the values of global metrics of the overall digital conversation.

Network about #WordEnvironmentDay digital conversation

The captured conversation has been transformed to a network graph containing a total of 187,322 actors and 470,594 weighted connections (see Fig.  3 ). Thus, the general approach to the network makes it possible to observe that each actor in the network is connected on average to 5.02 other actors, which gives a scenario of few connections. In addition, the density of the network shows that only 0.001341% of the possible links between users have occurred. It cannot be said that the members form a well-connected network; hence, it is suggested that there are still many unanswered key questions for WED ( 2021 ).

Regarding centralization metrics, the low values of input degree centralization (6.17312%) and the output degree centralization (0.440149%) show that the network is decentralized in both input and output degree. Hence, neither the reception nor the emission of mentions is dominated by a small group of actors; however, it is a network in which mentioning and being mentioned are clearly different phenomena (C D in  = 0.06173120 vs C D out  = 0.00440149). Betweenness centralization is also low (0.695135%), therefore, the intermediation of the network is not in the hands of a small group of actors, it is distributed in a horizontal way.

The overall sentiment found in the digital discussion is positive (0.366685821). It seems that users opt for a positive tone to celebrate a day that calls for action to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of the planet. Figure  4 shows that 67.9% of the tweets have been positive, and specifically, 45.43% of the tweets have been categorized as very positive.

Sentiment score of the overall digital conversation

Finally, after applying the Louvain Multilevel community detection algorithm, a total of 6,089 different communities have been identified with a modularity of 0.86 (high mathematical significance). This is a relatively large number of communities, many of them composed of short interactions, which is usual in analytical strategies of massive data, with a very good value for modularity. Among the more than 6,089 communities identified, the threshold has been set for those that contain at least 4% of the nodes, a total of 9. A more in-depth analysis of the main communities detected will be made in Sect. 5.1.3.

5.1.2 Semantic Analysis [RQ2]

Semantic analysis shows the topic hotspots of the overall digital discussion. The most relevant words network (see Fig.  5 ) and most relevant hashtags network (see Fig.  6 ) analysis makes it possible to identify key topic points around WED ( 2021 ).

Network of co-occurrence of the most relevant words

Network of co-occurrence of the most relevant hashtags

On the one hand, with regard to most relevant words network, from the 150 main initial words, once stopwords, mentions, hashtags and emoji have been removed, the weakest links have been deleted. The minimum weight taken into account for the edges has been 900, i.e., 17.72% of edges were considered. Moreover, only communities grouping 2% or more of the nodes in the network have been taken into account, i.e., 97.33% of nodes were considered. Finally, in order to consider the favorable positions of the words, the nodes have been weighted according to the intermediation or betweenness centrality (Hanneman, 2001 ).

Thus, the clustering of the most relevant words defines five clusters or communities. These communities represent topics of conversation, i.e., the main discussions held about WED ( 2021 ). So, through direct observation of the network, and by searching for these words in most relevant tweets (the most retweeted), the following five communities are found:

The first community (in pink), is formed around the term ‘environment’ and it is related to the event day (‘environment’, ‘world’, ‘day’, ‘today’, ‘5’, ‘june’, ‘2021’). In addition, positive communication in the conversation (‘happy’, ‘love’, ‘protect’, ‘protection’, ‘protecting’, ‘save’) and the sense of collectivity of the subject (‘together’, ‘people’, ‘everyone’) are observed. The second one (in light green), is slightly formed around the terms ‘us’ and ‘nature’ and mentions the central theme of WED ( 2021 ): Ecosystem Restoration (‘ecosystems’, ‘recreate’, ‘restore’). In this case, the positivity and collectivity of the message (‘better’, ‘us’) are also observed. The third one (in blue) is not formed around any influential word and the topics of conversation revolve around the host country and its prime minister (‘pakistan’, ‘host’, ‘country’, ‘khan’, ‘imran’, ‘minister’, ‘pm’, ‘leadership’). The fourth one (in orange) is formed around the term ‘trees’ and it is related to the nature restoration initiatives, in general (‘reduce’, ‘use’, ‘water’, ‘plastic’), and concretely to the initiative ‘Ten Billion Tree Tsunami’, which aims to achieve such reforestation by 2023 (‘tree’, ‘initiative’, ‘plantation’, ‘planted’, ‘planting’, ‘billion’). Finally, the fifth and smallest one (in dark green) is related to the protest action staged by Myitkyina's main strike group to mark WED ( 2021 ), as forests in Myanmar are being devastated by military.

After removing the hashtag ‘#WorldEnvironmentDay’ as it is used in the query, the procedure followed with hashtags for semantic analysis has been similar to the one used with the words. The minimum weight taken into account for the edges has been 100, i.e., 19.69% of edges were considered; and only communities grouping more than 2% of the nodes in the network have been taken into account, i.e., 68.92% of nodes were considered. The nodes have been weighted according to the intermediation or betweenness centrality.

In this case, the clustering of most important hashtags, i.e., most relevant grouping channels for discussion on specific topics, provides six clusters or communities of topics of conversation. However, of the six communities obtained, two stand out. The first one (in light green), is formed around the hashtag ‘#WorldEnvironmentDay2021’ and the second one (in pink) is formed around the official hashtag for the main theme of the event ‘#GenerationRestoration’. Most of the hashtags included in the first group refer to the event itself through different names of the event, date of celebration and essence of the event (‘#environmentday’, ‘#environmentday2021’, ‘#5thjune’, ‘#june5’, ‘#gogreen’, ‘#climatechange’), but there are also specific proposals carried out in relation to WED ( 2021 ) (‘#savetrees’, ‘#plantatree’, ‘#savewater’). In the second case, hashtags refer to ecosystem restoration (‘#ecosystemrestoration’, ‘#reimagine’, ‘#recreate’, ‘#restore’) but also to the host country (‘#pakistan’, ‘#wedpakistan2021’, ‘#pakhostingenvironmentday’, ‘#environmentchampionpmik’).

In the case of the smaller groups, the orange cluster refers to the coup d'état that took place in Myanmar on February 1 2021; the light blue cluster refers to India’s seventh art and its celebrities; the dark blue refers to the music video launch by Hyundai Motor's, featuring pop icon BTS, to celebrate WED; and finally, the dark green cluster refers to Banega Swasth India Campaign for better hygiene and sanitation practices in India.

5.1.3 Main community Analysis (RQ3)

Figure  7 shows the network of the main 9 communities generated around #WordEnvironmentDay digital conversation.

Network about #WordEnvironmentDay digital conversation with the nine most important communities and after filtering them (The community numbers have been randomly assigned by the algorithm and should not be interpreted ordinarily. The value in parentheses represents the percentage of nodes in each community)

In order to identify who the main communities are, their respective leaderships (top 5 of each community) were analyzed according to the input degree (see Table 4 ). From the data obtained, two main types of clusters can be observed: clusters belonging to the political sphere (cluster 4, 12, 14, 7, 15 and 8) and clusters belonging to the cultural and entertainment sphere (cluster 13 and 17) (cluster 22 is classified as miscellaneous). Thus, the absence of clusters formed around business leaders is notable. Although isolated actions by governments and civil society will not be enough to address the most pressing environmental challenges (UNEP, 2021 ), the private sector is hardly present in this discussion.

In addition, there is a strong Indian presence in the conversation. With the exception of the three clusters (which are positioned in the first half of the network: cluster 4, 7 and 8) the rest (which are positioned in the second half of the network: cluster 13, 12, 14, 15, 17 and 22) are mainly led by Indian accounts.

With China, the United States and India (DataBank, 2021 ) being the three countries that pollute the most through their carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions, the weak presence of the U.S. in the conversation is surprising (not so in the case of China, where Twitter has been blocked since 2009 (The Guardian, 2009 )); despite the United States being the second most polluting (and industrialized) country, it appears only sparsely in cluster 8.

Thus, digital mobilization is mostly focused (without taking into account the main community, cluster 4) on the host country and, above all, the neighboring country: India. The same can be seen in the coverage of the event by newspapers (news in English) on the day of the event and on the following day (June 5, 2021 and June 6, 2021): In first position, 108 news articles were published in Pakistan; in second position, India with 98; the US ranks sixth with only 18 news articles; and China is in twelfth place with only 7 publications (ProQuest, 2021 ).

Table 5 shows global metrics for the main communities. This information shows that, as expected, the densities of the main communities are higher than the density of the overall network, nevertheless, they are still low i.e., connectivity in the communities is low.

In the case of input degree centralization, clusters 12, 15 and 17 stand out for being highly centralized clusters (communities with a centralization rate of higher than 50%). These clusters respond to a retweeting behavior of one or a few actors, i.e., many users mention a few users. Belonging to a community of ‘high’ or ‘low’ centralization has to be understood as a behavioral trait of an actor on Twitter. The actors of highly centralized communities participate in the conversation by exploiting more ‘follower’ or even ‘warlordist’ resources, often limiting themselves to disseminating major opinion leaders and reproducing their opinions. Moreover, there is evidence to affirm that the type of message (more or less emotional or more or less visceral) is also related to this phenomenon (Larrondo et al., 2019 ). In this sense, it is observed that two highly centralized communities (cluster 12 and 15) show the least positive sentiment.

Regarding output centralization, no strange behavior is detected in any community. It does not seem that there is any suspicious account from which a large number of messages have been sent. Likewise, concerning the betweenness centralization, the intermediation in the main communities is not monopolized by a few users.

Finally, the type of content that has been important in each of the communities is analyzed (see Table 6 ) by close reading of the most retweeted tweets of each main community. Thus, it can be seen that these content are in line with the need of joint actions for environment and ecosystem restoration and the criticism and reference to political and civil society responsibility in the degradation of the environment. Once again, the absence of business or private sector responsibility in the digital conversation is conspicuous.

5.1.4 Key Players [RQ4]

Table 7 shows information about node-level metrics, and, therefore, about key players in the digital discussion.

In a Twitter network, as a general rule, on the one hand, a high input degree is interpreted as leadership or prescriptive capacity, i.e., as a capacity to influence in the network; and on the other hand, a high output degree is interpreted as high participation or activity in the same network. Thus, as expected, the main leader of the conversation was the organizer of the initiative: United Nations Environment Programme (@unep). Likewise, the main leaders of the conversation belong to the major communities and are well-known personalities or entities. Therefore, it can be seen that the messenger has eclipsed the message and, as expected, it was a planned conversation and not a spontaneous one. Conversely, regarding the output degree, the most active users in the network, those that have issued the most mentions, have been non-public persona or people that are more anonymous.

Another interesting indicator in communicative networks such as Twitter is the betweenness centrality. The weighted input and output degrees of a node do not provide the necessary information to interpret its centrality and the geodesic position of a node can affect its structural situation in terms of influence or power (Hanneman, 2001 ). Hence, assuming that the highly central nodes are located in favorable structural positions within the network, it can be seen that accounts belonging to cluster 4 (cluster related to the United Nations) control the network communication flows.

6 Conclusions and Futures Lines of Work

Twitter is a social network where opinion trends are generated. Likewise, Twitter could play a fundamental role for different institutions or agents to obtain information in order to understand how to exert influence in digital public debate and, therefore, in society; what the image they transmit to public opinion is; or how a political initiative, a marketing campaign or, as in this specific case, an environmental program, is being received by the wider public.

WED ( 2021 ), subject of study of this research, deals with one of the biggest problems facing humanity today and in the future: protecting the environment. Therefore, analysis of the digital conversation held in relation to the celebration of WED ( 2021 ) provides substantial information on various issues such as the success of this public initiative, the terms under which the initiative is debated, the relationships established between the different actors taking part in the debate, etc.

Specifically, in this scientific work, through a methodology designed ad hoc, different research questions were answered in order to analyze the impact of WED ( 2021 ) program on society.

The success of the initiative was relatively demonstrated by the fact that the hashtag #WorldEnvironmentDay was a trending topic worldwide. However, this study offers other valuable and transcendent information from a social perspective, that goes beyond the mere count of tweets published worldwide about this event.

There are certain factors that indicate that the network campaign for the WED ( 2021 ), strategically designed and planned by the organizing institution (the United Nations), obtained excellent results. It can be concluded that the strengths of the event at the digital level were the following: the digital conversation was plural in terms of leadership and content; there were no groups that functioned as "trolls", feeding eventual destructive criticism towards the organizing institution or the objectives pursued by the event; participation was in positive and constructive terms; the institution controlled or directed, through the official hashtags, the frames of the digital debate and placed itself at the center, dynamizing the discussion and functioning as a link between different communities.

These types of institutions, as in the case under investigation, have to deal with similar events or initiatives every year (or every so often). This means that these institutions have to design strategic actions and communication strategies cyclically according to the established objectives. In this sense, this scientific research may help organizations to make strategic decisions, identifying the weaknesses and opportunities of the event at the digital level, which are explained as follows:

In the case analyzed, the data reveal a relative absence of global connections or coordinated actions at the digital level to address one of the biggest challenges facing society, i.e., protecting the environment. The communities are divided by country (mostly centered in the host country, Pakistan, and especially in the neighboring country, India), by political ideology and by type of actors. This means that the impact of the event is neither global nor homogeneous and that the "micro-debates" that occur in the conversation are "intra-community" and isolated. Therefore, this feeds the current theory on the influence of digital activity on public opinion in social networks, which speaks about the tendency towards homophily and the confirmation of one's own biases around public controversies.

Moreover, considering that we live in a globalized, polycentric and highly interconnected world. It is paradoxical that this type of events that address a global problem become phenomena that could be classified as ‘concentric digital influence’ (greater influence in areas closer to the physical center). In this sense, the organizer of the event faces two challenges for the future: first, the decision of the host country should be taken with a highly strategic perspective; second, actions must be taken to ensure the influence of the event in the digital terrain overcomes this limitation of space-nation in the geographical domain.

In addition, it is noted that politics, culture and entertainment are the collectives that have presence in the conversation. However, there is a clear absence of the business sphere. That absence is twofold: on the one hand, they do not appear to be criticized or to be praised; and on the other hand, they do not appear as a dynamic agent of the conversation. There is practically no joint or individual strategic action on the part of the companies that also influence the real basis of the debate around World Environment Day. It is also worth noting that the second most polluting country on the planet, the United States, is also not very active in the conversation.

All in all, much of the research on the phenomenon of social networks defends the thesis that they fuel controversy and polarize society. However, the case studied in this study is a good example of non-polarized digital conversation and for the most part developed in positive terms. Consequently the actors of public communication find a forum or meeting space where they can express their wishes, proposals or even criticisms in a constructive sense.

Likewise, this study addresses a phenomenon related to mass communication. Twitter is indeed considered a communication and interconnection medium for the masses and a platform that mediates between the different actors that conform public opinion. In this sense, it is worth asking how, on the one hand, social networks have influenced the process of setting the public and media agenda and, on the other, the construction of public opinion itself. In the old paradigm, the traditional media had a monopoly on agenda setting and influenced the framework in which society should understand and interpret public controversies. Today, the traditional media have lost that exclusivity. In fact, the case analyzed in these pages is paradigmatic of this issue, since it shows that a public or private organization can set the digital agenda, without intermediaries, through a strategically planned campaign. However, in addition, and as a major difference between traditional and current communication platforms, an institution can even directly influence the setting of the subtopics that are addressed in a given conversation, the terms or frameworks in which it takes place, the agents or subjects that participate in it, etc.

Finally, despite the limitations shown by Twitter due to the bias of the data collected, bias of representation when making general assumptions and other problems, derived, for example, from the language used by the users (Ruiz-Soler, 2017 ), this study reinforces a valid methodology for any institution or agent wishing to analyze its impact on society through social networks.

Alhindi, W. A., Talha, M., & Sulong, G. B. (2012). The role of modern technology in Arab Spring. Archives Des Sciences, 65 (8), 101–112.

Google Scholar  

Apodaka, E., & Morales-i-Gras, J. (2016). Redes solidarias en Twitter: Un acercamiento a la estructura del independentismo catalán en base a datos capturados en Twitter. Virtualis. Revista De Cultura Digital, 7 (14), 53–88.

Barrios-O’Neill, D. (2020). Focus and social contagion of environmentalorganization advocacy on Twitter. Conversation Biology, 35 (1), 307–315. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13564

Article   Google Scholar  

Bastian, M., Heimann, S., & Jacomy, M. (2009). Gephi: An open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. In International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media .

Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J.-L., Lambiotte, R., & Lefebvre, E. (2008). Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 8 (10), 10008. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008/pdf

Burak, D. (2017). Environment as politics: Framing the Cerattepe protest in Twitter. Environmental Communication, 13 (5), 617–632. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2017.1406384

Campos-Domínguez, E. (2017). Twitter y la comunicación política. El Profesional De La Información, 26 (5), 785–793.

Carrasco-Polaino, R., Villar-Cirujano, E., & Tejedor-Fuentes, L. (2017). Twitter como herramienta de comunicación política en el contexto del referéndum independentista catalán: Asociaciones ciudadanas frente a instituciones públicas. ICONOS, 16 (1), 64–85. https://doi.org/10.7195/ri14.v16i1.1134

Casero-Ripollés, A. (2018). Investigación sobre información política y redes sociales: puntos clave y retos del futuro. Profesional De La Información, 27 , 964–974.

Cheong, M., & Lee, V. (2009). Integrating web-based intelligence retrieval and decision-making from the Twitter trends knowledge base. Proceedings of the Second ACM Workshop on Social Web Search and Mining , 1–8.

Coletto, M., Lucchese, C., Orlando, S., & Perego, R. (2015). Electoral predictions with Twitter: A machine-learning approach. 6th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop , 1–12.

Concepto. (2021). Medio Ambiente—Qué es, importancia, contaminación y protección . Medio Ambiente. https://concepto.de/medio-ambiente/

Congosto, M., Basanta-Val, P., & Sanchez-Fernandez, L. (2017). T-Hoarder: A framework to process Twitter data streams. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 83 , 28–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2017.01.029

Cormode, G., Krishnamurthy, B., & Willinger, W. (2010). A manifesto for modeling and measurement in social media. First Monday . https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i9.3072

Dann, S. (2010). Twitter content classification. First Monday . https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i12.2745

DataBank. (2021). DataBank. The World Bank . https://databank.worldbank.org/home.aspx

Daume, S. (2016). Mining Twitter to monitor invasive alien species—An analytical framework and sample information topologies. Ecological Informatics . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2015.11.014

Del-Fresno-García, M. (2014). Haciendo visible lo invisible: Visualización de la estructura de las relaciones en red en Twitter por medio del análisis de redes sociales. Profesional De La Informacion, 23 (3), 246–252. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2014.may.04

Edrington, C. L., & Lee, N. (2018). Tweeting a Social Movement: Black Lives Matter and its use of Twitter to Share Information, Build Community, and Promote Action. The Journal of Public Interest Communications , 2 (2), 289. https://doi.org/10.32473/JPIC.V2.I2.P289

Fernández-Gómez, E., & Martín-Quevedo, J. (2018). La estrategia de engagement de Netflix España en Twitter. Profesional de La Información , 27 (6), 1292–1302. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2018.nov.12

Fownes, J. R., Yu, C., & Margolin, D. B. (2018). Twitter and climate change. Sociology Compass . https://doi.org/10.1111/SOC4.12587

GitHub. (2021). Mariluz Congosto . https://github.com/congosto

Greenpeace. (2021). Cambio climático . https://es.greenpeace.org/es/trabajamos-en/cambio-climatico/

Hanneman, R. A. (2001). Introducción a los métodos del análisis de redes sociales capítulo sexto: centralidad y poder. In Introducción a los métodos del análisis de redes sociales .

Heidbreder, L. M., Lange, M., & Reese, G. (2021). #PlasticFreeJuly—Analyzing a worldwide campaign to reduce single-use plastic consumption with Twitter. Environmental Communication, 15 (7), 937–953. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2021.1920447

Hendriks, C. M., Duus, S., & Ercan, S. A. (2016). Performing politics on social media: The dramaturgy of an environmental controversy on Facebook. Environmental Politics, 25 (6), 1102–1125. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2016.1196967

Hutto, C. J., & Gilbert, E. (2014). VADER: A parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2014 , 216–225.

Hutto, C. J. (2022). vaderSentiment . https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment

Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., & Tseng, B. (2007). Why we Twitter: Understanding microblogging usage and communities. Proceedings of the Ninth WebKDD and First SNA–KDD 2007 Workshop on Web Mining and Social Network Analysis , 56–65.

Juanals, B., & Minel, J.-L. (2018). Categorizing air quality information flow on Twitter using deep learning tools. In Computational Collective Intelligence (pp. 109–118). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98443-8_11

Krishnamurthy, B., Gill, P., & Arlitt, M. (2008). A few chirps about Twitter. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Online Social Networks , 19–24.

Larrondo, A., Morales i Gras, J., & Orbegozo, J. (2019). Feminist hashtag activism in spain: Measuring the degree of politicisation of online discourse on #yosítecreo, #hermanayosítecreo, #cuéntalo y #noestássola. Communication and Society , 32 (4 Special Issue), 207–221. https://doi.org/10.15581/003.32.4.207-221

Lesaca, J. (2015). Twitter como herramienta de los movimientos sociales y políticos para imponer frames en la opinión pública . https://aecpa.es/es-es/twitter-como-herramienta-de-los-movimientos-sociales-y-politicos-para/congress-papers/1389/

Li, M., Turki, N., Izaguirre, C. R., DeMahy, C., Thibodeaux, B. L., & Gage, T. (2021). Twitter as a tool for social movement: An analysis of feminist activism on social media communities. Journal of Community Psychology, 49 (3), 854–868. https://doi.org/10.1002/JCOP.22324

Ljubljana-University. (2021). Orange data mining—Data mining . https://orangedatamining.com/

Marín-Dueñas, P. P., Simancas-González, E., & Berzosa-Moreno, A. (2019). Twitter and political communication: the case of the Partido Popular and Podemos in the 2016 general elections. Cuadernos.Info , 45 , 129–144. https://doi.org/10.7764/cdi.45.1595

Mazzoleni, G. (2010). La comunicación política . Alianza Editorial.

Medina, I. G., Miquel-Segarra, S., & Navarro-Beltrá, M. (2018). El uso de Twitter en las marcas de moda. Marcas de lujo frente a marcas low-cost. Cuadernos. Info, 42 , 55–70. https://doi.org/10.7764/CDI.42.1349

Microsoft. (2021). About Power Query in Excel—Excel . https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/about-power-query-in-excel-7104fbee-9e62-4cb9-a02e-5bfb1a6c536a

Morales-i-Gras, J. (2020). Datos masivos y minería de datos sociales: conceptos y herramientas básicas (p. 32). Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Mrvar, A., & Batagelj, V. (2021). Programs for Analysis and Visualization of Very Large Networks Reference Manual . http://mrvar.fdv.uni-lj.si/pajek/pajekman.pdf

Naaman, M., Boase, J., & Lai, C.-H. (2010). Is it really about me? Message Content in social awareness streams. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work—CSCW’10 .

Navas, A. (2018). Modelo de variables de desempeño e impacto en Twitter . Universidad de Navarra.

OpenRefine. (2021). A free, open source, powerful tool for working with messy data . https://openrefine.org/

Orbegozo-Terradillos, J., Larrondo-Ureta, A., & Morales-i-Gras, J. (2020). Influencia del género en los debates electorales en España: análisis de la audiencia social en #ElDebateDecisivo y #L6Neldebate. Profesional De La Informacion . https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.mar.09

Otero, P., Gago, J., & Quintas, P. (2021). Twitter data analysis to assess the interest of citizens on the impact of marine plastic pollution. Marine Pollution Bulletin . https://doi.org/10.1016/J.MARPOLBUL.2021.112620

Pang, N., & Law, P. W. (2017). Retweeting #WorldEnvironmentDay: A study of content features and visual rhetoric in an environmental movement. Computers in Human Behavior, 69 , 54–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.12.003

Pear-Analytics. (2009). Twitter study . http://www.slideshare.net/stephendann/twitter-analytics

Peplow, A., Thomas, J., & AlShehhi, A. (2021). Noise Annoyance in the UAE: A Twitter Case Study via a Data-Mining Approach. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18 (4), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.3390/IJERPH18042198

ProQuest. (2021). World Environment Day (05-06-2021 / 06-06-2021) . https://www.proquest.com/results/9542C419B6CB45C0PQ/1?accountid=17248

Reyes-Menendez, A., Saura, J. R., & Alvarez-Alonso, C. (2018). Understanding #worldenvironmentday user opinions in twitter: A topic-based sentiment analysis approach. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15 , 1–18. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15112537

Ruiz-Soler, J. (2017). Twitter research for social scientists: A brief introduction to the benefits, limitations and tools for analysing Twitter data. Revista Dígitos, 1 (3), 17–32. https://doi.org/10.7203/rd.v1i3.87

Statista. (2021). Global penetration social media 2020 | Statista . https://www.statista.com/statistics/274773/global-penetration-of-selected-social-media-sites/

The Guardian. (2009). China blocks Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail ahead of Tiananmen anniversary . https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jun/02/twitter-china

UN. (2021). World Environment Day: Millions rally behind movement to restore the earth . https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/world-environment-day-millions-rally-behind-movement-restore-earth

UNEP. (2021). Private Sector Engagement . https://www.unep.org/about-un-environment/private-sector-engagement

Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1994). Social Network analysis: Methods and applications. Cambridge University Press . https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815478

WED. (2021). World Environment Day . https://www.worldenvironmentday.global/

Wu, S., Hofman, J. M., Mason, W. A., & Watts, D. J. (2011). Who says what to whom on Twitter. In International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) , 705–714.

Download references

Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Faculty of Engineering, Industrial Organization and Management Engineering Department, University of the Basque Country, Pl. Ingeniero Torres Quevedo, Bilbao, Spain

Enara Zarrabeitia-Bilbao, Izaskun Alvarez-Meaza & Itziar Martínez de Alegría-Mancisidor

Faculty of Engineering, Industrial Organization and Management Engineering Department Vitoria-Gasteiz, University of the Basque Country, Nieves Cano 12, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

Rosa-María Rio-Belver

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Enara Zarrabeitia-Bilbao .

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Zarrabeitia-Bilbao, E., Rio-Belver, RM., Alvarez-Meaza, I. et al. World Environment Day: Understanding Environmental Programs Impact on Society Using Twitter Data Mining. Soc Indic Res 164 , 263–284 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-022-02957-y

Download citation

Accepted : 23 May 2022

Published : 16 June 2022

Issue Date : November 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-022-02957-y

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• World Environment Day
• Social network analysis
• SNA metrics
• Environmental programs
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

World Environment Day: Earth ‘cannot keep up with our demands’

Facebook Twitter Print Email

“This planet is our only home”, Secretary-General António Guterres said in his message for World Environment Day, to be marked this Sunday, warning that the Earth’s natural systems “cannot keep up with our demands”.  

“It is vital we safeguard the health of its atmosphere, the richness and diversity of life on Earth, its ecosystems and its finite resources.  But we are failing to do so,” said the UN chief .  

“We are asking too much of our planet to maintain ways of life that are unsustainable,” he cautioned, noting that this not only hurts the Earth, but also its inhabitants.

Ecosystems support all life on Earth. 🌍For #WorldEnvironmentDay, learn how you can contribute to preventing, halting & reversing ecosystem degradation in a new FREE course on Ecosystem Restoration by @ UNDP & @UNBiodiversity.➡️ https://t.co/zWevUxHkPU #GenerationRestoration pic.twitter.com/UoJDpFTFw8 UN Biodiversity UNBiodiversity

Manage nature wisely

Since 1973 , the day has been used to raise awareness and generate political momentum around growing environmental concerns, such as toxic chemical pollution, desertification and global warming.

It has since grown into a global action platform, helping to drive change in consumption habits, as well as in national and international environmental policy.

By providing food, clean water, medicines, climate regulation and protection from extreme weather events, Mr. Guterres reminded that a healthy environment is essential for people and the Sustainable Development Goals ( SDGs ).  

“It is essential that we wisely manage nature and ensure equitable access to its services, especially for the most vulnerable people and communities,” Mr. Guterres underscored.

Ecosystems under fire

More than three billion people are affected by degraded ecosystems. Pollution causes some nine million premature deaths each year, and more than one million plant and animal species risk extinction – many within decades, according to the UN chief.

“Close to half of humanity is already in the climate danger zone – 15 times more likely to die from climate impacts such as extreme heat, floods and drought,” he said, adding that there is a 50:50 chance that global temperatures will breach the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5℃ in the next five years.  

And by 2050, more than 200 million people each year risk displacement through climate disruption.

‘Alarm bells’

When world leaders came together 50 years ago at the UN Conference on the Human Environment , they committed to protecting the planet.  

“But we are far from succeeding.  We can no longer ignore the alarm bells that ring louder every day,” warned the top UN official.

The recent Stockholm+50 environment meeting reiterated that all 17 SDGs rely on a healthy planet to avert the triple crises of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.

He urged Governments to prioritize climate action and environmental protection through policy decisions that promote sustainable progress.  

Speed up renewable energy

The Secretary-General outlined recommendations to activate renewable energy everywhere by making renewable techologies and raw materials available to all, cutting red tape, shifting subsidies and tripling investment.

“Businesses need to put sustainability at the heart of their decision-making for the sake of humanity and their own bottom line.  A healthy planet is the backbone of nearly every industry on Earth,” he said.

He advocated for the empowerment of women and girls as “forceful agents of change,” including in decision-making at all levels.  And upheld the usage of indigenous and traditional knowledge to help protect fragile ecosystems.

Tracking success

The UN chief flagged that history has shown what can be achieved when we put the planet first, pointing to a continent-sized hole in the ozone layer that triggered every country to commit to the Montreal Protocol , which phased out ozone-depleting chemicals.  

“This year and the next will present more opportunities for the global community to demonstrate the power of multilateralism to tackle our intertwined environmental crises, from negotiations on a new global biodiversity framework to reverse nature loss by 2030 to the establishment of a treaty to tackle plastics pollution,” he stated.

Mr. Guterres reiterated the UN commitment to lead cooperative global efforts, “because the only way forward is to work with nature, not against it”.  

‘Running against the clock’

The Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme ( UNEP ), Inger Andersen, reminded that the international day was born at the 1972 UN Conference in the Swedish capital, out of the understanding that “we need to stand up to protect the air, land and water on which we all depend…[and] that the power of people matters, and matters greatly”.

“Today, as we look to a present and a future of heatwaves, droughts, floods, wildfires, pandemics, dirty air and plastic ridden oceans and yes, wars action is more important than ever, and we are running against the clock.”

Ms. Andersen put the responsibility squarely “on all of us”.

She highlighted that politicians must see beyond elections to “intergenerational wins”; financial institutions must finance the planet, and businesses should account for nature.

Consequences of war

Meanwhile, David Boyd, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, warned that conflicts are intensifying environmental devastation, and rights violations.

“Peace is a fundamental prerequisite to sustainable development and the full enjoyment of human rights, including the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” he said.

Conflicts consume “vast quantities” of energy; produce “huge emissions of climate-disrupting greenhouse gases”, increase toxic air, water and soil pollution, and destroy nature , he argued.

The UN-appointed independent expert highlighted the environmental fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and its rights implications, including the right to live in a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, saying it would take years to repair the damage.

“Many countries have announced plans to expand oil, gas and coal extraction in response to the war” in Ukraine, Mr. Boyd said, while noting that multi-billion-dollar rebuilding and restoration proposals post-conflict, would also add to environmental pressures facing the world.

The destruction of thousands of buildings and essential infrastructure will leave millions without safe drinking water – another essential right.

As the world grapples with climate disruption, collapsing biodiversity and pervasive pollution, the UN expert stressed: “It is imperative to end wars, ensure peace and begin the healing and restoration processes as soon as humanly possible.”

• World Environment Day

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Elsevier - PMC COVID-19 Collection

Earth Day: 50 Years of Continuity and Change in Environmentalism

Thomas dietz.

1 Department of Sociology and Environmental Science and Policy Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48864, USA

In April 1970, the first Earth Day engaged millions of people in thousands of events around the US. Those events reflected the emergence of a new form of environmentalism. Many of the themes present 50 years ago persist, but in the US environmental issues have become more politically polarized, and it is unclear whether such value conflicts will persist in the future.

The spring of 1970 was a turbulent and difficult time in US politics. October and November 1969 had seen large demonstrations against the Vietnam war. The following year, on April 30, the Republican Nixon administration announced that US and South Vietnamese troops would invade neutral Cambodia. Three days later, Ohio National Guard troops fired on protestors at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. 1 This was followed on May 15 by police firing on students at Jackson State University, killing two and wounding 12. Over 500 campuses closed, and there were other forms of protest at hundreds more. The country was deeply polarized between those who supported the war and those who opposed it, a polarization that foreshadowed splits in contemporary US politics. The first Earth Day took place on April 22 in the midst of this instability, and its campaigns and the environmental movement it birthed were inevitably influenced by the politics of the time.

The first Earth Day might very well have been the largest series of coordinated political activities in the history of the US. The organizers reported that 2,000 campuses, 2,000 communities, and 10,000 high schools held events. 2 It engaged millions and garnered extensive media coverage. 3 US Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin initiated Earth Day to draw attention to the growing concern with environmental issues. Nelson and his staff, with advice and support from prominent environmental scientists and environmental organization leaders and the labor movement, led the creation of the non-profit Environmental Teach-In. 3 Many of the national organizers had experience in the civil rights and anti-war movements, whereas financial support for the national office came from mainstream politicians and labor unions. The idea of a “teach-in” resonated with many campus events designed to educate students, faculty, and the public about the war in Vietnam during the 1960s. The goal of Earth Day was much the same: to create grassroots-based events across the country.

An Environmental Convergence

Although the event was heavily influenced by the US politics of the time, from an environmental perspective Earth Day crystallized the convergence of several themes that would define environmentalism for the decades that followed. Since the turn of the 20 th century, a conservation movement concerned with what would today be considered biodiversity had remained distinct from concerns about environmental health and exposure to toxins. But in 1962 Rachel Carson’s pathbreaking Silent Spring brought these two streams of concern together through highlighting the detrimental effect that the widely used pesticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was having on both environmental and, by extension, human well-being. At the time, diverse approaches were being offered to address environmental and other social problems. The traditional conservation and environmental health movements had focused on legislation and policy. The pacifist, counterculture, and women’s movements saw politics in daily life and promoted lifestyle and behavioral change. Some in the civil rights movements and especially the anti-war movement felt that reform and individual action could not solve societal problems and called for transformational change. Scientists were politically active and central to environmental discussions because they were able to draw on experience in mobilizing against nuclear fallout and against nuclear war, which many scientists saw as potentially catastrophic. In making their arguments to the public, many scientists assumed an “information-deficit” model—that if people understood the facts, they would take action. But importantly, there were also calls for changes in values and ethics. 4

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the environmentalism of the 1960s and early 1970s was that it seemed to span the otherwise deep political divisions in the country. Republicans supported the environmental policy initiatives of the time, even as they had supported the conservation movement throughout the 20 th century. 5 , 6 Because of this bipartisanship, more environmental laws were passed in the late 1960s and early 1970s than in any other period of US history. 7 The Environmental Protection Agency was created by executive order in December 1970. From 1969 to 1980, the cornerstones of US environmental policy became law, including the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and a dozen laws or amendments to laws to address pollution and toxins in the environment.

Earth Day reflected these themes. Earth Day speeches highlighted environmental justice and called for government and personal action. Critiques of population and economic growth, capitalism, consumerism, and militarism were all prominent. 2 Science was invoked in nearly every talk, and most events featured scientists as speakers. Many speakers invoked the idea of a looming catastrophe, and artwork produced for Earth Day often displayed severe environmental degradation or a devastated world.

Environmentalism Evolves

Although the first Earth Day might have seeded the environmental movement, the developments during the 50 years since have shifted the scope of what we consider environmentalism. As early as 1973, the global oil embargo focused attention on energy, presaging current concerns with global issues, such as greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. It was increasingly realized that regional impacts could have a global effect. Environmental concerns sparked the examination of local issues in the context of global processes, leading to an increased emphasis on teleconnections that link ecological and human systems across the planet. 8 In 1972, the widely publicized Limits to Growth report questioned the sustainability of population and economic growth, and by the 1980s the idea of sustainability was invoked in several international calls to combine efforts to improve human well-being with efforts to reduce human stress on the environment, most notably by Our Common Future , also known as the Brundtland Report (1987). 9 And although images of catastrophe persist, especially around climate change, starting in the 1980s many environmental problems were framed in terms of risk in an attempt to acknowledge that decisions must be made in the face of uncertainty. 10 Requirements for quantitative risk analysis were incorporated into many laws and regulations in the US and around the world.

In the US, this shifting environmental landscape was influenced by an undercurrent of politics, and the most troubling change was a clear polarization of environmental politics. With the Reagan election in 1980, a sharp split between the left and right began to shape environmentalism. After the energy crisis, efficiency and renewables were promoted, but so was the increased use of nuclear power and fossil fuel production, initiating an initial fissure in the bipartisan alliance on environment. 11 Advocates of deregulation and unfettered markets, the “neo-conservatives,” had a growing influence on Republican thinking. 6

This polarization persists today and is clearly reflected in public opinion. A substantial body of literature documents that in the US, beliefs in and concern about climate change are driven primarily by political ideology and that conservative rejection of climate change has intensified over the last few decades. 12 Public opinion on the environment over time seems to reflect power shifts between Republicans and Democrats. A careful analysis of public opinion from 1973 to 2014 shows that having a Republican as president increases public support for the environment in what might be an expression of concern about actions that could be taken by the administrative branch. 13 And since the 1970s, environmental legislation has been more likely during periods with a Republican as president and with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, again apparently a defensive stance. 7

Worryingly, such polarization has the power to subdue the effects of massive environmental campaigns such as Earth Day. Take the “baby boom” generation (or cohort) for example. The baby boom cohort (those born 1946–1960) were mostly in college or high school in 1970 and thus experienced Earth Day activities at a crucial time in their personal development. Yet overall, this cohort is no more pro-environmental than earlier or later cohorts. 13 However, Democrats and Independents among the baby boom cohort are notably more pro-environmental than other cohorts, whereas Republicans are not. Earth Day had an impact on baby boomers, but it was divided by political ideology.

This polarization has been driven by an active movement to resist government regulation with support from some major corporations, think tanks, and conservative billionaires. 12 , 14 For a century, those opposing regulatory action—first on the use of lead in gasoline and then on smoking, acid precipitation, ozone depletion, and most recently climate change—have repeatedly deployed an argument that the science is too uncertain to warrant policy action. These arguments have been resonant with conservative intellectuals, politicians, and voters and have facilitated polarization. Concern for the environment is tightly linked to values and personal identity. 12 Since Earth Day, political campaigns have sought to mobilize identity to garner support, especially by using the “us-versus-them” strategy deployed by Nixon and Reagan. This has undoubtedly facilitated the ideological split on environmentalism. So even as the scope of environmental concerns has broadened and the scientific basis for taking action has improved, the politics in the US have become increasingly difficult. In the case of climate change, although the proportion of the public who are concerned has increased over the last decade, a strong ideological split between Democrats and Republicans persists. 12 , 15

Environmental science has grown increasingly sophisticated in assessing critical facts and in characterizing the uncertainty in our understanding. There has also been some progress in recognizing that diverse values are in play and in finding ways to incorporate them into decision making. In particular, processes to establish a dialog between researchers and the public—those interested in or affected by a decision—are routinely advocated as an effective tool. 16 Such processes of linked analysis and deliberation inform the science, help shape public views, and can reduce polarization. We have learned how to conduct such processes at the local level, where many environmental conflicts unfold; the challenge is to have effective dialog at the national and global levels, where the effects of polarization are so evident.

Reflecting on the Last 50 Years and the Future

Many aspects of the environmentalism that emerged around Earth Day persist today. Environmentalism and environmental research will continue to strive toward broad, integrative interdisciplinary perspectives and toward analysis that accounts for teleconnections across the globe in coupled human and natural systems. A major change has been the growing, albeit slow and incomplete, recognition that social science must be engaged. After all, it is human action that drives environmental problems and human consequences that motivate most of our concerns. Since 1970, the environmental social sciences have flourished, but the struggle to fully incorporate them into the environmental discourse continues to be a major and debilitating challenge.

Environmental justice and the search for ways to better integrate diverse values with scientific analysis in decision making will continue to be matters of deep concern, more so now than ever before. There is growing appreciation of the importance of indigenous and local knowledge. The information-deficit model of decision making is finally being displaced by an awareness of the need to address diverse values and the utility of linking analysis with public deliberation.

It is difficult to know whether the conservative resistance to environmental policy in the US will be a phenomenon restricted to the last half-century or whether it will persist and continue to derail these efforts. There is growing awareness that, although some corporations actively resist any action on the environment, others can instantiate substantial reforms, and those actions might lessen conservative resistance to environmental action. 17 The increasing diversity of the US electorate might also dilute opposition to environmental policy given that groups whose political engagement is growing are quite pro-environmental. 18 Finally, the strong response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic offers some hope about our ability to respond to scientific assessments of risk. But the ideological split on environmentalism came from well-orchestrated campaigns to shape opinion and policy, and we have not yet seen that kind of pushback around the current pandemic. So, it is hard to know whether decision making based on scientific assessment of pandemic risks will persist or whether the approach will gain traction in other domains, such as climate change.

Continuing the successes of environmentalism—an integration of science, a concern with human well-being and justice, and a recognition of the need to consider facts, values, and uncertainty—is crucial for dealing with climate and other global environmental challenges. Moreover, environmentalism can teach us important lessons as we engage the new challenges that will certainly emerge from the impacts and potentials of bio-, info-, nano-, and neuro-technologies. Research can help us understand the obstacles we face in decision making and suggest ways forward. Thus, as in 1970, we need to find ways to link scientific analysis to political action and overcome the polarization that has shaped and defined environmentalism in the US for the past half-century.

Acknowledgments

T.D.’s research is supported in part by Michigan AgBio Research of Michigan State University.

An unexpected error occurred. Please try again.

Thank you for signing up

Climate Action

World environment day: protecting our planet one action at a time.

• World Environment Day: Protecting…

June 5, 2023

June 5, 2023 marks the 51st World Environment Day established by the United Nations, which began in 1972 at the Conference on the Human Environment, to recognize the protection and health of our environment as a global issue. It is one of the largest days for environmental public outreach and awareness encouraging people to engage in activities promoting the preservation and enhancement of our shared home.

Within the past decade, there have been countless devastating environmental catastrophes, plaguing our planet with wildfires, hurricanes, degraded ecosystems, ocean pollution, and floods. Yet, we never hear about all the hard work and environmental achievements from those dedicating their efforts to restoring Mother Earth from the detrimental impacts of humans. Whether it is through legislation, environmental projects, or community engagement, people across the globe are making progress towards a healthy planet every day by Investing in Our Planet . 

As climate change raises sea levels, enhances extreme weather effects, and erodes coasts across the globe, the need to build up climate resilience has never been more critical. Coastal cities and island nations are currently facing national security crises. The Stimson Center is tackling this issue head on through its Climate and Ocean Risk Vulnerability Index (CORVI) project. 

CORVI is a tool created to aid governments, businesses, and financial institutions with assessing climate risks in coastal cities and identifying areas of action to adapt to these threats. CORVI combines economic, social, and environmental data to create a holistic assessment to determine how resilient a coastal city is to climate and ocean risks. This project is currently being used by over 15 cities in several countries across the world like Barbados, Madagascar, Kiribati, Fiji, and Kenya, to name a few. The research and resources provided by the Stimson Center is helping cities most at risk build climate resilience before it is too late. 

Governments are taking greater leaps toward climate change mitigation and prevention through ambitious new legislation. Recently, lawmakers for the European Union’s 27 countries embraced new trade rules for taxing imports according to the amount of carbon a company emits during production of a particular good. This is the first attempt thus far to incorporate trade and climate policy in this way. Pricing greenhouse gas emissions follows the “polluter pays” principle, providing incentives to industries to lower their carbon emissions and invest more in green technology. 

EU lawmakers hope this inspires other large countries like China and the U.S . to adopt strong environmental regulations in order to protect their own domestic industries. Ideally, the goal of these new laws is to incentivise manufacturers to cut emissions themselves in order to make them more attractive to consumers and markets in the EU. Additionally, if this law succeeds in inspiring other large countries to create their own carbon taxes, the potential to cut emissions globally could be immense. 

Even individual community members have the ability to create immense change against years of human environmental degradation. Delima Silalahi , a recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize, is an example of a community member who saw a problem and fought to change it. Faced with the expropriation of Indigenous land for the paper and pulp industry in Indonesia, Silalahi mobilized local villages and led a campaign to secure legal stewardship of 17,824 acres of forest for Indigenous communities. Silalahi traveled to several villages, educating people and mapping forests. After securing legal stewardship of these areas, Silalahi along with other local eco-warriors have engaged in reforestation efforts by replanting native species to promote tree cover and natural climate resilience. 

When we invest in our planet, we see real outcomes with lasting impacts. For example, a small grant given to a project based in the University of the West Indies 20 years ago would manifest into saving Hawksbill sea turtles in Barbados. Barbados is home to the second-largest Hawksbill sea turtle nesting population in the Caribbean. This species of turtles are classified as critically endangered after facing decades of being hunted, coastal development, and climate change. The Barbados Sea Turtle Project helps scientists and conservationists study the movements, growth rates, survival, and reproductive output of sea turtles by tagging the turtles to measure them, and then analyze the evidence to inform proper conservation efforts. The project has become an integral part of sea turtle conservation making Barbados an international example of success in this area. 

All of these actions were accomplished by individuals, groups, organizations, and governments with a vision for change, proving we too have the ability to work together to Invest in Our Planet . With a vision, goal, and little bit of work, our joint efforts have the potential to be transformative. We all have the ability to take action big or small whether it may be recycling, signing petitions, protesting, or composting. I challenge you today to take action and find a way to participate in the fight for a healthier planet this World Environment Day. Change begins with us, so Invest in Our Plane t now.

• invest in our planet

Sydney Pike

Related stories, the rising tide of climate migration, answering nature’s call in the boy and the heron, greenwashing: how industries lie to you.

Hi, It seems you are visiting us from India, would you like to visit our India pages?

Yes please No thank you

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals

Environmental studies articles from across Nature Portfolio

Cities committed to climate action despite covid-19.

How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect urban climate actions worldwide? A study now finds that although the climate commitments of most cities persisted, low engagement in green recovery interventions can hamper long-term goals.

• Daniel Lindvall

Drivers and barriers for the transition from solid fuels to liquefied petroleum gas in Ghana

Factors such as wealth might be expected to affect the transition to clean cooking, specifically the transition choices of uptake, primary use, and exclusive use of liquefied petroleum gas. Data from Ghana’s largest household energy survey show, however, that eleven out of thirteen factors considered do not have a significant or consistent role across these transition choices.

Latest Research and Reviews

The effects of neighbourhood green spaces on mental health of disadvantaged groups: a systematic review

• Tomoki Nakaya
• Jinguang Zhang

Establishing ecological thresholds and targets for groundwater management

This study demonstrates the evaluation of groundwater-dependent vegetation responses to changes in the depth to groundwater based on satellite-derived normalized difference vegetation index, a simple and practical approach that supports water and conservation management.

• Melissa M. Rohde
• John C. Stella
• Christine M. Albano

Urban Nature Indexes tool offers comprehensive and flexible approach to monitoring urban ecological performance

• Jennifer Rae Pierce
• Laura Costadone
• Jonathan Hughes

Agricultural management practices in China enhance nitrogen sustainability and benefit human health

The exact quantification of environmental and human health gains achieved through sustainable nitrogen management is often impaired by real-world data availability. Drawing on an extensive database in China, this study estimates the costs and benefits of combining organic and chemical fertilizers, straw recycling and deep placement of fertilizer.

• Jiakun Duan
• Hongbin Liu

Ownership of battery electric vehicles is uneven in Norwegian households

The type of vehicles owned by Norwegians depends on household size, income and work commute, and battery electric vehicle ownership is concentrated in the wealthier part of the population, according to an analysis of socio-economic data of 2.4 million households from 2005 to 2022.

• Davood Qorbani
• Hubert P. L. M. Korzilius
• Stein-Erik Fleten

An agent-based evolutionary system model of the transformation from building material industry (BMI) to green intelligent BMI under supply chain management

News and Comment

When will the BBNJ Agreement deliver results?

A new international agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) was adopted and subsequently opened for signature in September 2023. Yet on average, recent multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) have taken over four years to move from signature to entry into force, while ocean-focused MEAs have taken nearly twice as long. Rapid ratification of the BBNJ Agreement is crucial for multiple reasons, not least to achieve the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework target for 30% of the marine environment to be protected by 2030. It is also vital to fulfill the Agreement’s stated ambition to contribute to a just and equitable future for humankind, considering today’s unprecedented expansion of commercial activities into the ocean.

• Robert Blasiak
• Jean-Baptiste Jouffray

Restoration as a meaningful aid to ecological recovery of coral reefs

Restoration supports the recovery of ecological attributes such as cover, complexity, and diversity to slow the areal decline of natural ecosystems. Restoration activity is intensifying worldwide to combat persistent stressors that are driving global declines to the extent and resilience of coral reefs. However, restoration is disputed as a meaningful aid to reef ecological recovery, often as an expensive distraction to addressing the root causes of reef loss. We contend this dispute partly stems from inferences drawn from small-scale experimental restoration outcomes amplified by misconceptions around cost-based reasoning. Alongside aggressive emissions reductions, we advocate urgent investment in coral reef ecosystem restoration as part of the management toolbox to combat the destruction of reefs as we know them within decades.

• David J. Suggett
• James Guest

The Global Biodiversity Framework’s ecosystem restoration target requires more clarity and careful legal interpretation

• Justine Bell-James
• Rose Foster
• James A. Fitzsimons

Particulate matter sampling to assess air pollution

Lisbett Materano highlights how urban dust samples can be used to identify environmental and health risks from air pollution.

• Lisbett Susana Materano-Escalona

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

An official website of the United States government

Here’s how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

JavaScript appears to be disabled on this computer. Please click here to see any active alerts .

50 Years of Earth Day with EPA Researchers

Published April 20, 2020

It’s no coincidence that EPA shares its 50th anniversary with Earth Day. Fifty years ago, in the spring of 1970, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day to show the country’s political leadership that there was broad public support for the environmental movement.

On April 22,1970, twenty million Americans across the country took to the streets to demonstrate their desire for a healthy environment. It worked--in December 1970, Congress authorized the creation of a new federal agency to tackle environmental issues, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Earth Day is now celebrated by one billion people in over 190 countries around the world. After 50 years of environmental progress, our researchers continue to find new ways to protect the environment and the American people.

Need some Earth Day inspiration? Read about what made these EPAers dedicate their careers to protecting the environment and how they are safely celebrating Earth Day this year.

Jennifer and her husband on a hike in Jackson Hole, Wyoming . Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, EPA Office of Research and Development (ORD) Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator and Acting EPA Science Advisor

What inspired you to work to protect the environment.

I’ve always been interested in science and the outdoors. Originally, I was fascinated by marine science. I grew up outside of Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1960s and that’s when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. Going into Cleveland at that time, the steel mills were in full production and streetlights would turn on at noon due to all the smoke, even with the sun out. I also read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson at a young age, which was another strong influence on my decision to work in environmental science and protection.

Do you have a favorite Earth Day memory?

My favorite Earth Day memory was a field trip my 6 th grade science class took to a wastewater treatment plant. I always had a fascination with water and seeing the interaction of human waste, water treatment, and the environment really connected the concept of environmental systems for me. Field trips like that are great ways to teach the next generation about the need for environmental work and protection.

How will you celebrate Earth Day this year?

For many years, my Earth Day celebrations have focused on encouraging ORD staff to participate in local and Agency activities. Every ORD location holds different events and I take pride in how our staff value environmental protection and celebrate Earth Day. This year’s Earth Day events may have been impacted by Coronavirus, but I do still plan to spend some time cleaning up my neighborhood while safely keeping my distance from my neighbors.

Additionally, my family maintains an annual butterfly garden. Even though my allergies might disagree, we enjoy doing our part to support pollinator health.

Walter Berry in a canoe on his way to count sparrows on the salt marsh. Walter Berry, Research Biologist

I decided I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was nine years old, after reading a book by Jacques Cousteau. Working to protect the ocean and what lives in it followed naturally. I have been fortunate to be able to do just that for a living for over 40 years.

My favorite Earth Day memory is of the first Earth Day cleanup we had at our local pond, with dozens of local middle schoolers and neighbors. We filled a town dump truck with shopping carts, tires of all sizes (from tricycles to tractors), and other junk. Each year thereafter we got less and less junk.

It looks like it will be just me and the dog this year, but there is a stretch of road near my house I have been dying to clean up. Hopefully I will get out into the kayak for a little fishing afterwards.

Mehdi Hazari playing soccer. Mehdi Hazari, Research Physiologist

I had the opportunity to visit many countries in the East, both when I was young and much later as an adult. It pained me to see the deteriorated state of the environment in those places; some of this was due to neglect and apathy, but some of it was because of the abject poverty of the people who lived there. I have always thought of our country as a positive example to others, as a leader in environmental protection and the betterment of people’s lives. Hence, I wanted to do my part, albeit in a small way, so that some of that good might make its way down to people who may not be as empowered in other parts of the world.

My fondest memory of Earth Day is bringing my nine year-old daughter, now a college student, to EPA for the great activities that are arranged for them on the occasion. What stuck out was her jubilant greeting when I met her at the end of the day and the non-stop stories of all the amazing things she learned.

 How will you celebrate Earth Day this year?

I will celebrate Earth Day this year by finally installing a composter in my yard and barrels to collect rainwater – my small part, I guess.

Hiking Mount Sanitas in Boulder on New Year’s Day this year with my family (though just my daughter is in the picture with me – she’s a pro at taking selfies). Britta Bierwagen, Branch Chief

I’ve always loved to be outside, hiking, skiing, paddling, gardening, and participating in a long list of other activities. In college, I loved my biology and ecology classes, as well as the wonderful trips I took as part of the Outdoors Club! I felt that protecting and improving the environment was really important, and I wanted a career that would contribute to that.

My daughter’s Girl Scout troop participated in a stream cleanup event for Earth Day a few years ago. It was so wonderful to see so many girls helping to improve our stream environment. They had a fabulous time and were so proud of their accomplishment. They organized additional clean-up events on their own thereafter!

Originally, we were going to participate in a stream cleanup as a family as part of a paddling event. Unfortunately, those activities have been canceled. We may just head down to our local creek and pick up trash, keeping at least six feet apart from anyone else! It’s a challenging time for what are normally really fun group events.

Ingrid (center) with her favorite people in the entire world: Husband Jim, Sophia (age 11) and Tyler (age 6). Ingrid L. Druwe, Toxicologist

 I have always loved two things: science and people. I always knew I wanted a job that allowed me to do what I love because then it wouldn’t feel like “work”. When I learned early in my undergraduate career about the scientific work being done at EPA and the importance of the mission which closely aligns with my personal beliefs, I knew that was where I wanted to end up. Then I learned about EPA’s IRIS program and the incredibly talented people there. I knew that was who I wanted to be, what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to do it. I focused as many of my activities, academic and extracurricular, to align my skillset with the needs of the IRIS program.

The Earth has such an abundance and diversity of life and beauty. By spending time observing it and meditating on it, I have been able to gain important life lessons, which I have been able to instill in my own children and also share with others. The wisdom gained by observing the natural world has helped me to keep a calm mind and spirit during these unprecedented times while also allowing me to help and comfort my neighbors and friends. The environment is full of such wonder that I hold it as a privilege to work for the governmental agency whose duty is to protect it.

Yes! The first year that my family and I moved to North Carolina after I completed my graduate degree. My daughter was four and had started preschool. I recruited another student friend of mine and we went to her preschool and led a class of 20 3- and 4-year-olds in a series of activities from making “Earth” Rice Krispies treats, to face painting, planting trees, and reading Dr Seuss’ The Lorax. To be able to share my love for what I do with my daughter and her class was something I’ll never forget and something I’ve since then been able to do with my son’s class when he got to preschool.

Well, this year Earth Day will be like no other since we are all working remotely and staying home, but I have planned to send our friends seeds for our “pizza garden” (our garden will grow toppings that we and our friends like to have on our pizza including homemade pizza sauce) that they can grow at their homes. Hopefully by the time these seeds are saplings they can come over and plant them in our garden. Our plan is to have a big pizza party after the harvest, because every day IS Earth Day! We will also be making Earth Day cookies and delivering them to our friends and neighbors (doorstep delivery only of course).

Amalia at Sycamore Creek in central Arizona during a flood in January 2017. This stream is one of the systems she studied for her dissertation research. Amalia Handler, EPA Postdoctoral Fellow

A high school mentor told me, “The biggest things are done by the smallest organisms” while holding out a handful of soil. Learning about the complexity of soil and the many human activities that degrade it was one of my first windows into environmental science.

While a graduate student, I attended local high school’s earth day celebration as an educator. One of the other booths at the festival had solar-powered mechanical cockroaches that would move while in direct sunlight. The school students (and I) couldn’t get enough of these mechanical roaches bouncing and crawling around the sidewalk. It was a great way to get everyone interested in the mechanics of solar power.

The Willamette River cleanup event I was planning to attend was rescheduled for later this summer. So, I am planning to spend Earth Day at home, perhaps gardening.

Stephen somewhere in the North Cascades of Washington. Stephen Pacella, Research Ecologist

I grew up spending most of my free time outside mountain biking, climbing, sailing, and generally exploring the more remote corners of western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. It’s a beautiful part of the country, and these outdoor experiences instilled in me a deep appreciation and curiosity for our natural environment. This is also a region with a long history of industrial activity and resource extraction, and I think the need for balance between human progress and environmental protection felt especially obvious to me and the community I was a part of there. Like most, my path to becoming a scientist with the EPA was circuitous, but I have always been motivated by opportunities to explore the basic functioning of natural systems and apply the findings to outstanding challenges in science and management. I feel fortunate to have found a career that allows me to spend so much time thinking about and trying to understand the natural world around us, as well as our society’s impacts on this environment.

I’m not sure I could name a favorite one, but last year our lab (the Pacific Coastal Ecology Branch in ORD) spent the day doing a beach cleanup at a popular state park and surf spot. I was expecting to find the usual local litter from the crowds it can see on weekends, but most of what we were cleaning up was plastic pollution deposited on the beach by ocean currents and mixed into the sand and wrack. Plastic pollution (especially microplastics) is something we all discuss quite a bit these days but seeing the extent of it that day reminded me of the often global nature of our environmental issues today, and the complexities of meeting these challenges at local scales.

  How will you celebrate Earth Day this year?

This Earth Day will likely be much different than any I (or anyone else?) have had before with our stay-at-home order here in Oregon due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Right now, it is hard to ignore how dependent the health and stability of our society is on the natural environment around us, and how we manage that relationship. Even if I’m not able to get outside to celebrate, I think it will be a good time to both reflect on what our society has accomplished in the name of environmental protection, and refocus my own efforts on the environmental challenges we are likely to face in the future.

Last fall visiting the beautiful Causeway Coastal Route in Northern Ireland. Lisandra and her husband spent a week exploring the area and taking in all the amazingness of nature. Lisandra SD Trine, Chemist, Pathways Intern

I grew up in Puerto Rico, in the middle of the island and at high elevation. From our property you could see the ocean (North and East coast of Puerto Rico) and our National Forest, El Yunque. I spent many hours with my grandmother sitting on the balcony, in awe of the views and how amazing our Earth is. And I just knew I needed to work on something or somewhere where I could help protect those views, close and far.

In college I was a member of the American Chemical Society Student Chapter in Puerto Rico. For three years we hosted the ‘Festival de Quimica’ (Chemistry Festival) at El Paseo la Princesa in San Juan. Hundreds of participants had the chance to explore how chemistry and other sciences are present in our lives. I remember every festival very fondly, with joy and hope for our environment and future scientists.

Since 2014, my husband and I have planted a new fruit tree in our yard for Earth Day. For this year we picked 2 gooseberry plants. We also enjoy watching Disneynature movie releases for Earth Day every year. For 2020, they are releasing the film called Elephant.

Mike Slimak on La Rive Gauche.  Michael Slimak, Director, Sustainable & Healthy Communities Research Program, EPA/ORD

What inspired you to work to protect the environment .

My father and maternal grandfather taught me about the natural sciences and the importance of “listening and observing” nature.  Also, the writings and ethos of Aldo Leopold.

I was teaching high school biology on April 22, 1970 (the first Earth day) when I took my AP Biology class to the local stream to look for aquatic insects and to remove debris (e.g., tires, trash, etc).

How will you celebrate Earth Day this year? 

The past few years I’ve participated in a spring warbler bird count. With the pandemic, my excursions in the Wake Forest, NC, area may be somewhat limited.   

Valerie doing what she loves most: communicating with rocks! Valerie Cover Garcia, Associate Director, Air Monitoring and Characterization Division

I have a passion for rocks—the very skin of the Earth! This passion has led me to a deep connection with nature and a desire to protect it.

Do you have a favorite Earth Day memory? 

I love the fact that we pause to reach out to children on Earth Day. 18 years ago (2002), my daughter entered an Earth Day poster competition with a picture of a turtle swimming across Earth with a caption of “Abuse It…And Lose It”.  She has never lost her enthusiasm for protecting the Earth and is passing this love on through teaching!

You’ll find me safely picking up trash along my favorite streams and rivers! I gain such a sense of satisfaction from this simple act. 

Kyle contemplates an Earth Day alone in nature… Kyle Buck, Human Geographer

I have a research background and interest in human health risks, and the environment plays a huge role in this. I really enjoy trying to connect the health of the natural environment to the human/social environment.

Mine is definitely from my first Earth Day at EPA’s Gulf Ecosystem Measurement and Modeling Division. We had not done an event in many years and our outreach committee managed to bring it back. It was amazing! So many people from the community came out and had some great memories of past events. It was really special to have a new generation of kids coming to the island and seeing their excitement as they learned about the EPA mission and what we do.

My goal is to spend the day entirely outdoors. There aren’t many options for celebration right now, unfortunately. Maybe I’ll have some cake, too…if I can find any flour at the store.

Rebecca taking in the view with her older brother somewhere in the Rocky Mountains sometime around Earth Day in the 1980s.  Growing up in Colorado, she spent a lot of quality family time in the station wagon going to state and national parks in the western U.S. Rebecca Dodder, Supervisory Physical Scientist/Branch Chief

What inspired you to work to protect the environment   .

As a scientist, I was always drawn to areas of work where we could apply scientific knowledge to advance the public good. It was during graduate school, while working on a project on air quality in Mexico City, that I really began to understand how protecting the planet and improving environmental quality could so directly impact people’s quality of life on a daily basis.  

I don’t know if I have a particular Earth Day memory.  But, Earth Day falls around both my birthday and my wedding anniversary.  To me, this time of year is generally a feeling of hope and renewal.

How will you celebrate Earth Day this year?  

As a family, we’re still looking for unique, socially-distanced ways to celebrate the day.  Any ideas are welcome!  We try to embody Earth Day in what we do every day: picking up trash when we go on family hikes, being efficient in our energy use in the home and when driving/travelling, and choosing environment- and conservation-oriented non-profits to support.   

Melissa McCullough.  Melissa McCullough, Associate National Program Director, SHC

 I love it, and it has problems that are solvable.

At the 20 th Earth Day, I sang with a group of EPA friends (John Bachmann’s Luna Tunes) at the celebration on the National Mall in Washington DC.

 How will you celebrate Earth Day this year? 

I’m giving a sustainability talk via Skype to BlueCross BlueShield. I am also trying to line up a speaker for our Sierra Club meeting about the Durham BioBlitz, and how to use iNaturalist.

Bruce at Magnetic Island on the Great Barrier Reef. Bruce Rodan, Associate Director for Science

 what inspired you to work to protect the environment   .

I feel very fortunate to work for the EPA – I have a professional career solving environmental problems that I would otherwise pursue as a volunteer.

I wasn’t always this mission-oriented. I had a great start in life roaming free on the river banks – sort of a Huckleberry Finn on the edge of the Outback – and holidaying on golden tropical beaches with rock pools filled with colorful fish (and the odd sea snake).

My first Earth Day memory was when I was a medical student watching the documentary “Bloody Ivory.” This was quite a personal epiphany, with the destruction and injustice awakening my lifetime career path.

I have since become increasingly aware of the opportunity for life, love, and beauty all around and in all we do, from the big to the small, from the global to our own backyards.

I started through volunteer work on tropical rainforest conservation, which ultimately introduced me to some amazing people in the Federal government who share this passion, and who guide the power of this great country for the betterment of humanity.

Now, while on COVID-19 home-stay, it’s a little less grandiose and I go for exercise walks in the nearby park, playing I-Spy with my wife to find and retrieve pieces of trash. If you see the trash, the other has to pick it up. Yes, much fun can be had on cliff edges … followed by hand sanitizer.

  How will you celebrate Earth Day this year?  

For this Earth Day, I will plant more native pollinator habitat to create a “zoo in my own backyard.” I have succeeded in luring bluebirds to nest, the next big challenge being to recruit an endangered rusty-patch bumblebee to the yard.

Sarah Mazur at Glacier National Park.  Sarah Mazur, Associate National Program Director for the Sustainable and Healthy Communities Research Program

In 8 th grade, I had an amazing biology teacher whose passion for science was infectious. As I learned more, I realized the inextricable link between humans and the world around us, how humans have influenced nature over time, and the importance of viewing ourselves as part of that broader system. I really feel driven to protect and restore the environment, help find solutions to prevent further damage, and demonstrate that what’s good for the environment is also good for people. 

I don’t know about a favorite, but a few years ago, my husband and I went to Cape May, NJ for a long weekend at a B&B. We stumbled upon a small local vegan restaurant that had a special Earth Day menu and live music. Afterwards, we took a long walk on the beach, watched the sunset, and appreciated the natural beauty around us. 

I will likely take a long walk with my family along a local trail, spend time outside in our yard, and focus on appreciating the beauty around us. Spending time outdoors in nature has definitely helped keep me grounded as I adjust to life in the time of COVID-19.

Tammy with Walter Boynton collecting sediment cores to assess the health of the Chesapeake Bay. Tammy Newcomer-Johnson, Ecologist

As a child, I loved to play outside and climb trees and look for salamanders in our local stream with my brother and our golden retriever. I still find a glimpse of a white-tailed deer or a woodpecker to be mesmerizing. Looking for spring blooms is one of my favorite scavenger hunts. I care deeply about the environment for the sake of the plants and animals. And I’m inspired to work to protect the environment because I think all people should have access to clean air, safe water, and beautiful natural areas to inspire them.

When I was an undergraduate student, I submitted my first grant application to plant 300 native trees on UMBC’s campus on Earth Day. Even though my grant application was not selected, I had a team of mentors who told me not to give up. We found local sources to sponsor the cost of the trees, shovels, gloves, buckets, and T-shirts for the volunteers. It took some grit to organize the logistics, but it was so rewarding when over a hundred volunteers showed up to plant the trees! Since then, I have enjoyed going back to the site every few years to see how the trees have grown. 

I had planned to participate in a large Earth Day event with the EPA lab in Cincinnati. However, due to the pandemic, I’ll be home. I plan to walk around the neighborhood with my 1-year-old son Nathan and look at the street trees that are blooming. I hope to inspire his sense of wonder.

Michael Dumelle. Michael Dumelle, Mathematical Statistician

I want to do all I can to protect the only Earth we have.

What is your favorite Earth Day memory?

Picking up trash at a local beach with my father

Cleaning up some backyard fruit trees.

Editor's Note:  The opinions expressed herein are those of the employees alone. EPA does not endorse the opinions or positions expressed.  

• Science Matters Home
• Researchers at Work Profiles
• All Stories

Every Day is Earth Day: Evidence on the Long-term Impact of Environmental Activism

We explore the importance of activism in the context of Earth Day. We use variation in weather to study the long-term effects of the original Earth Day on attitudes, environmental outcomes, and children's health. Unusually bad weather in a community on April 22, 1970, is associated 10 to 20 years later with weaker support for the environment, particularly among those who were school-aged in 1970. Bad weather on Earth Day is also associated with higher levels of carbon monoxide in the air and greater risk of congenital abnormalities in infants born in the following decades. These results indicate a long-lasting and localized effect of Earth Day, and show that there can be benefits to voluntary activity that would be impossible to identify until years after the volunteering occurs.

We thank Frank Passic, Walt Pomeroy, Jim Seidel, Larry Taylor, Mark Wilhelm, and audiences at the SPI Conference at the University of Chicago, at the H2D2 Conference at the University of Michigan, Notre Dame, and at the ASSA Conference. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

Download Citation Data

• April 7, 2020

Published Versions

Mentioned in the news, more from nber.

In addition to working papers , the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter , the NBER Digest , the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability , the Bulletin on Health , and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship  — as well as online conference reports , video lectures , and interviews .

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Earth Day is an annual celebration that honors the achievements of the environmental movement and raises awareness of the need to protect Earth’s natural resources for future generations. Earth Day is celebrated on April 22 in the United States and on either April 22 or the day the spring equinox occurs throughout the rest of the world.

Biology, Ecology, Geography

Loading ...

Learning materials, instructional links.

• National Geographic Education: Introduction to Earth Day

Earth Day is an annual celebration that honors the achievements of the environmental movement and raises awareness of the need to protect Earths natural resources for future generations . Earth Day is celebrated on April 22 in the United States and on either April 22 or the day the spring equinox occurs throughout the rest of the world. Environmental activism during the 1960s inspired Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson to create a national celebration uniting the environmental movement. With the help of Denis Hayes, a graduate student at Harvard University, Nelson organized the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, educating participants in the importance of environmental conservation . Attended by 20 million people across the United States, the event strengthened support for legislation such as the Clean Air Act (updated in 1970) and the Endangered Species Act (1973). In 1990, Hayes organized a global Earth Day, with more than 200 million participants in more than 140 countries. Earth Day now brings together citizens and activists from around the world to raise awareness and take action regarding such environmental concerns as global warming and renewable energy . Today, the Earth Day Network (EDN) , which brings together more than 20,000 partners and organizations in 190 countries, supports the Earth Day mission year-round. This mission is founded on the premise that all people, regardless of race , gender , income , or geography , have a moral right to a healthy, sustainable environment. The Earth Day Network pursues this mission through education, public policy , and activism campaigns. These campaigns bring together more than one billion participants every year, making it one of the largest public, secular events in the world. The Earth Day Network pursues a set of core goals:

• Broaden the meaning of environment to include issues such as climate change , green schools and environmental curricula, green jobs , and renewable energy ;
• Diversify the movement by providing civic engagement opportunities at the local, state, national and global levels around the world. Recognizing that climate change impacts our most vulnerable citizens first and most severely, EDN often works with low-income communities to bring their voices and issues into the movement.
• Mobilize communities by working with partner organizations to provide opportunities for all citizens to become active in the environmental movement.

Earth Days Core Issues This set of goals underlines Earth Day events and actions around the world, which can be organized into ten core issues. Advocacy : Supporters encourage individuals and organizations to meet with elected officials to discuss environmental issues. The online program "Million Acts of Green," for instance, encourages visitors to adopt lifestyle changes such as composting, reducing your carbon footprint, or recycling e-waste.

Climate Change : Supporters raise awareness about climate change , human contribution to those changes, and opportunities to slow the phenomenon . Many Earth Day supporters, for instance, encourage citizens to support the landmark Paris Climate agreement, set to be signed on Earth Day 2016.

Conservation & Biology : Supporters work to conserve the world's biodiversity . On Earth Day 2010, for instance, participants in Sri Lanka planted more than 100 medicinal plants throughout the tropical rain forest at Yagirala Forest Reserve. These plants can be used by local populations and will create habitats for different organisms, enhancing the biodiversity of the island nation. Education : Earth Day education programs provide educators, students, and the general public with resources and solutions to create a healthier, more sustainable planet. On Earth Day 2010, for instance, teachers and students in the Compostela Valley region of the Philippines participated in a day-long conference. At the conference, they learned about tree planting and care, participated in nature hikes, and presented their environmental action projects to the community. Energy : Advocates support projects that develop renewable energy sources and technologies as means of transitioning off of nonrenewable sources, such as coal and oil . Citizens of Qatar, for example, are invited to switch off their power for one hour on Earth Day in a symbolic stance against human contributions to global warming. Food & Agriculture : Supporters raise awareness about some farming practices, such as the use of chemical pesticides , which contribute to environmental degradation . Supporters also advocate for a greater support of organic , local, and sustainable agricultural techniques. Member organizations of this issue group include Articultores , based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which raises awareness about urban gardening and brings citizens and youth together to plant in abandoned sites in cities. Green Economy : Supporters advocate for the creation of green industries and jobs that are connected to renewable energy sources. For example, the Students in Free Enterprise group in Saskatchewan, Canada, sponsors a prize for student projects that make best use of recycled materials. Green Schools : The Earth Day Network sponsors the National GREEN Schools Campaign. The GREEN Schools Campaign includes a focus on healthy school lunches, environmental classroom activities, outreach to local and national leaders, and an emphasis on sustainable building techniques. Recycling & Waste Reduction : Supporters work to reduce the amount of waste that people produce, and increase the amount that we recycle and reuse. The Beach Bunch group of Brunei, for example, organizes beach-cleaning campaigns. Sustainable Development : Supporters promote environmental practices that respect biodiversity and the natural world. Costa Rica, for instance, has implemented the Viaje Limpio program, in which individuals and companies pay a fee for the greenhouse gases they produce through travel. This money goes to protect the rainforest, water resources, and biodiversity of Costa Rica. Viaje Limpio helps the Costa Rican economy, because biodiversity and the rain forest are important natural assets that bring thousands of tourists to the country every year. In only 40 years, Earth Day has evolved from a single day celebrating the environmental movement in the United States to a global network that empowers more than a billion people to better understand, protect, and improve the environment.

Why April 22? Earth Day falls on April 22. The day was chosen by the original event's organizer, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (for the state of Wisconsin), for simple reasons. Earth Day was an event focused on college students, and April 22 did not interfere with Spring Break, final exams, major religious holidays such as Easter, and was late enough in spring to anticipate decent weather for outdoor activities.

Margaret Mead's Holy Day "Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space." <br> Margaret Mead, cultural anthropologist

Articles & Profiles

Media credits.

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Last Updated

March 27, 2024

User Permissions

For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.

If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media.

Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service .

Interactives

Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives.

Related Resources

• Biodiversity
• Cities & society
• Land & water
• All research news
• All research topics
• Learning experiences
• Programs & partnerships
• All school news
• All school news topics
• In the media
• For journalists

Earth Day and beyond

More than 50 years after the first Earth Day, Stanford experts discuss the experiences that inspire people to learn and care about the environment and take action.

Late in January 1969, an enormous oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara slathered 35 miles of shoreline with crude oil and killed thousands of birds, fish, and sea mammals. Just a few months later, debris and pollution in Ohio’s Cuyahoga River burst into flames. The two events helped to inspire millions of people to participate in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 and galvanize the modern environmental movement. 

“The Santa Barbara oil spill grabbed the nation’s attention at a moment when people were available to pay attention to the drama. That event was sufficient to wake people up to the fact that perhaps human interaction with the natural environment is not all good, and that we need to do our part to protect nature if we’re going to put it at risk,” said  Jon Krosnick , a social psychologist in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences whose research includes studies of public opinion on climate change and the environment.  

Today, Earth Day is commemorated in more than 190 countries with rallies, festivals, cleanup projects, conferences, citizen science projects, and other activities. “Earth Day provides us with opportunities to think about positive paths forward so people feel excited to get up and do something, while letting people know that there are challenges we face,” said Stanford environmental behavioral scientist Nicole Ardoin , who researches individual and collective environmental behaviors and whose teaching covers topics such as the thinking, social context, and motivations that lead people to take actions related to the environment. “It’s a razor’s edge between hope and fear, and optimism and pessimism, and how much of each is needed to motivate people to engage.”

Here, Ardoin, Krosnick, and Earth system science assistant professor Gabrielle Wong-Parodi , who studies how and why people choose to address climate impacts, discuss some of the psychology behind environmental decisions, the motivation for their own work, connections to the inaugural Earth Day, and more.

About the experts

Nicole ardoin.

Nicole Ardoin is the Sykes Family Director of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) and an associate professor in the social sciences division of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability . She is also a senior fellow at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and an affiliate at Precourt Institute for Energy .

Jon Krosnick

Jon Krosnick is the Frederic O. Glover Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences . He is a professor of communication, political science, and (by courtesy) of psychology and a professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s social sciences division.

Gabrielle Wong-Parodi

Gabrielle Wong-Parodi is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science and the social sciences division of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She is also a Center Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

What types of environmental learning initiatives tend to have the most impact long-term?

Ardoin: Learning initiatives that are more successful encourage us to think of ourselves as part of a broader movement. We are all like nesting dolls, existing within many layers of sociocultural, historical, political, ecological contexts. Every action that we take is in response to other people, and to the ecosystem around us.

This way of thinking about environmental learning represents a shift from 20 or 30 years ago, when there was more focus on individual learning and behavior change. A lot of the educational and behavior-change campaigns at that time emphasized actions like getting people to change a single light bulb or think primarily about their own recycling behaviors. Now we recognize those smaller, more independent actions are really challenging to maintain over time and, most importantly, to feel like you’re actually making a difference.

Solving wicked problems – meaning, complex systems challenges where there’s not a single, linear pathway toward change or solutions – requires collective action. In our lab, the Social Ecology Lab , we try to understand the complex processes that shift people from focusing on singular actions to thinking about what kind of person they are or aspire to be, especially as part of a broader community. We’re interested in exploring the conditions under which people develop a mindset such as, “I’m the kind of person who takes the environment into account, or thinks about my community, or imagines the future for the youth in my life when I make a decision.”

Earth Day provides us with opportunities to think about positive paths forward so people feel excited to get up and do something, while letting people know that there are challenges we face. ” Nicole Ardoin Sykes Family Director of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) and Associate Professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s Social Sciences Division

In what ways does your group’s focus on communities and collective action relate to the roots of the environmental education field in the 1970s, around the time of the inaugural Earth Day?

Ardoin: One of the earliest formal definitions of environmental education came from a declaration adopted by the United Nations in 1977, known as the Tbilisi Declaration. What I love about the definition in that document and the discussion that occurred around it is that it emphasized the lifelong, life-wide nature of environmental education. It didn’t imagine environmental education as only occurring in schools, or only for youth.

As a colleague of mine likes to say, if we think of environmental education as something you only do once in fifth grade, and then you’re done with it, that means we’re left with outdated solutions to constantly changing problems. Throughout our lives, we need to be learning about the environment and sustainability challenges, and engaging with our neighbors, our policymakers, our colleagues about the state of science and the state of our policies.

Jon Krosnick, your surveys have found the portion of Americans who consider global warming to be of great personal importance (the “issue public”) reached an all time high of 25 percent in 2020. That’s an unusually large group compared to those who are passionate about other public policy issues. Can you explain why?

Krosnick: Every time we have another hurricane, and every time we have another wildfire, the media have the opportunity to talk about climate change. People are experiencing warmer temperatures and extreme weather events. So those experiences come together, leading more and more individuals to see this issue is affecting them or people they care about.

People don’t pop in and out of issue publics. Being in an issue public is like being married to the issue. It involves cognitive, emotional, and behavioral commitment. People don’t make commitments lightly or fleetingly. Issue public membership is driven by: Am I going to be personally affected by this? Are people I care about going to be personally affected by this? Do people I identify with care about it? And is this issue linked to my values? Thus, passion results from an issue like climate change becoming linked in a person’s mind to their self-interest, social identifications, or values.

Passion results from an issue like climate change becoming linked in a person’s mind to their self-interest, social identifications, or values. ” Jon Krosnick Frederic O. Glover Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

What factors motivate individuals and communities to respond to climate impacts?

Wong-Parodi: People make changes when they’ve had a bad experience with an impact (such as an extreme weather event), they attribute that experience to climate change, and they have the resources and support to make the change. A sense of self-efficacy and response-efficacy are also important. That’s the feeling that I can effectively take action, and that the action I want to take will reduce risk.

As a society, we will need to adapt to reduce human suffering and disruption to lives and livelihoods. Scientific research has shown that warming will continue even if emissions decline, and hence impacts will continue to worsen. This is especially acute in areas where communities may experience the “first and worst” of climate impacts and have access to fewer resources to manage risks.

What drives you to try to understand what Americans think about global warming, and the connection between their opinions and their voting behavior?

Krosnick: I got involved in studying this topic in 1995, because an economic consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts contacted me and said, “We’d like to invite you to a little conference for a few psychologists to talk about global warming.” My response was, “What’s that?” And they said, “don’t worry, we’ll have an MIT climate scientist educate you all, and then you can tell us your thoughts. Would you come?”

That meeting was sponsored by EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute. They were interested in why some people were aware of and concerned about climate change, and lots of people were not. I had a lot of expertise studying why some Americans become passionate about particular political issues, so it was natural for me to explore the same phenomenon regarding global warming.

At the end of the two days in Cambridge, our hosts asked whether any of us would like to take some money to do research on this topic? I put up my hand, and that launched almost 30 years investigating these issues. My first survey produced jaw-dropping results, and I was immediately addicted. I was surprised that a huge majority of Americans believed that climate change was happening and was a threat, when I had known nothing about it.

As I did more surveys over the years, I saw consistency of public opinion over time, despite hundreds of millions of dollars having been spent to try to push Americans’ views in one direction or another, trying to activate the American public on this issue – none of it having any success. I couldn’t be more excited to do our next survey, which we will launch very soon, to continue to track Americans’ perspectives.

Is the heightened attention to environmental stewardship during Earth Week each year something that makes a meaningful difference for individuals, communities, or societies?

Wong-Parodi: I think the increased attention can be helpful, especially among younger adults and school aged children (my own observation) as it offers a time for meaningful pause, learning, and reflection.

Krosnick: It’s easy to be distracted by the events unfolding in our personal lives and in the huge news stories dominating the front pages. Earth Day’s media focus provides an opportunity for everyone to pause and think about nature, from whatever perspective is meaningful to them, whether it’s having wild animals to watch, hikes in the woods to enjoy, or resources to power contemporary societies. Earth Day is a moment for appreciation and to be reminded of what the planet does for us all.

Ardoin: The attention from Earth Day might be helpful in lighting a spark for some people. Whether or not that goes beyond a one-time action and leads to real change in people’s everyday lives and core identities, however, depends on social context. People who make an initial commitment due to Earth Day are more likely to follow through and sustain that commitment over time if they do so along with friends, family members, and others in their community. Participating in collective actions is not only more likely to be sustained over time, it’s also more fun and impactful.

Learn about 2023 Earth Week events at Stanford.

Sustainable Stanford

Media Contacts

Nicole Ardoin Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability [email protected]

Jon Krosnick Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences [email protected]

Gabrielle Wong-Parodi Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability [email protected]

Josie Garthwaite Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability (650)497-0947; [email protected]

Explore More

Looking back on the first year of Stanford Ecopreneurship

A new report shares key accomplishments from the inaugural year of Stanford Ecopreneurship programs, a collaboration between the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Living Laboratory Partnership Summit kicks off Earth Month at Stanford

The summit convened students, faculty, and staff Tuesday to celebrate the sustainability collaborations and achievements taking place across campus.

Confronting the ‘two-headed monster’ of environmental injustice

Scholars and community leaders gathered at an environmental justice conference to discuss the importance of community-driven research, intersectional frameworks, and institutional legitimacy.

• Environmental justice

ASU helps document history, implement new technologies for 100-year-old botanical garden

University partnership with boyce thompson arboretum spans several innovative projects.

Purple blooms in the Hummingbird and Butterfly Garden at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum. Photo courtesy Meghan Finnerty/ASU

Earth Day is every day for the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, but this year is especially significant as it celebrates its 100th anniversary . Arizona State University is working with the arboretum on several innovative projects to document Arizona’s oldest and largest botanical garden.

The partnership with ASU is symbiotic, to use a biology term. The arboretum provides one-of-a-kind, hands-on experiences with desert plants, wildlife and ecosystems, and in turn, students, faculty and staff at ASU have helped develop resources and research that will keep the desert oasis blooming for centuries to come.

From desert plant research and conservation, to oral histories and archives, to immersive digital learning and advanced GIS mapping, current projects and programs span across the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences disciplines.

Decades of stories to tell

As part of the centennial celebration, the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies public history program partnered with the Desert Humanities Initiative to document oral histories and digital archives of the arboretum. 

The project, led by Associate Professor  Mark Tebeau , Program Coordinator  Erin Craft , graduate student Holly Barnard and alumni Taylor Bangerter and Mike Wohl, gave students the opportunity to interview dozens of employees, board members, volunteers and patrons of Boyce Thompson.

“What (the students) spoke about often was how almost every single person we interviewed really was connected. So not just, this is my job, this is what I do, but this is my place,” Craft said. 

“And they all had stories about their favorite areas of the arboretum or the plants that they loved.”

Mayor of Superior, Arizona, Mila Besich, who was interviewed as part of the project, shared her love for the arboretum and her fond memories of growing up nearby. 

She recounted the Telegraph Fire of 2021 and how she was part of the response team that contacted Sen. Mark Kelly to make sure the arboretum was saved. The fire lasted almost a month and burned over 180,000 acres, the second largest wildfire in the U.S. for that year.

Students also worked with the Boyce Thompson library to create a digital archive of its many artifacts. 

“Anytime we could be at the arboretum and we weren't conducting oral histories, we were in there creating a finding aid A finding aid is an organizational tool containing detailed, indexed information about a specific archival collection. , getting a grasp on the huge amount of stuff that was back there,” Wohl said.

Boyce Thompson is at the heart of Pinal County. ... It's fundamental to that county and its history. And so documenting this place is vital to understanding not just Boyce Thompson, but its surroundings and its relationship to them. Erin Craft

The students dug through thousands of documents, including botanical literature, educational posters, personal records, letters, maps and endless stacks of slides and photographs. Along the way, they discovered even more stories about the arboretum, many of which outlived those collected through the oral histories.

For example, they read about Fred Gibson, who was an instructor of plant pathology and was offered the job of leading the arboretum by Colonel Boyce Thompson in 1924, when the arboretum was founded.

This ongoing project has provided hands-on experience to students interested in pursuing careers as archivists and museum curators.

“It's on all my resumes that I've been sending out. I've got a couple applications to not only archives administrations, but some history consulting firms. I plan on using BTA for that,” Wohl said.

Future work will involve mapping human-environment interactions and creating public-facing art programming to highlight the arboretum. 

“Boyce Thompson is at the heart of Pinal County, a county that is rural, poor and doesn't get a lot of love,” Craft said. “It's fundamental to that county and its history. And so documenting this place is vital to understanding not just Boyce Thompson, but its surroundings and its relationship to them.”

Immersive technology for increased access

In addition to the historical archive, an interdisciplinary team at ASU is currently creating an immersive online course exploring the history, ecology, geology and botany of Boyce Thompson Arboretum and the town of Superior. 

With funding from Shelley Esque and Lenni Benson , they will use place-based software to create high-definition, 360-degree digital learning environments. 

Students will be able to navigate through the digital space embedded with layers of textual, video and audio resources. They will engage with the platform to explain and account for how plants, humans, animals, climates and technologies have shaped the area’s history.

The project team includes Professor Jason Bruner , Associate Professor Evan Berry , Professor Steven Semken , Associate Professor Erika Lynne Hanson , Graduate Teaching Assistant Luke Ramsey and Regents Professor Jonathan Bate . Together, they bring expertise in geology, art, history, sustainability and environmental humanities.

"There's just a lot to think about in a pretty tight area geographically speaking,” Bruner said. 

“It makes sense to try and get a botanist and a geologist and an artist and historian and so on together, and sort of in one way model for students how to think together about what it means to be in a place and to think with these different kinds of disciplinary tools and perspectives, appreciating different kinds of connections that each of any of those disciplines or practices and methods would bring.”

Semken, an ethnogeologist and geoscience education researcher whose work focuses on place-based and culturally informed geoscience education, has led geology hikes for several years as a volunteer at the arboretum. 

“If you look at Superior as a whole, it’s got interesting and instructive geology in terms of the fact that a large piece of Arizona’s geologic history is encapsulated in the rocks in that area,” Semken said.

“Both places are geologically illustrative and rich, and my role is to help expand that place-based education, develop it, assess it and teach it better.”

The course will be offered to students through The College’s culture, technology and environment bachelor’s degree program , which launched for immersion students in fall 2023 and will launch online in fall 2024. The digital environment will also be made available to Boyce Thompson employees and volunteers for training and continuing education.

“This is supposed to be a virtual, asynchronous course, so we want to create authentic virtual learning experiences out there at the arboretum and out there in the Superior area,” Semken said. 

“Traditionally, place-based education has been actually outdoors, or physically in person in a place, but now we are resorting more to virtual modalities to give us a chance to bring students to places where maybe they wouldn't have been able to go before.”

A game changer for hikers and horticulturists

In coordination with the 100th anniversary, Irina Chen, Yunru Lu and Amarchandra Yadavalli, who are now graduates of ASU’s master’s program in geographic information systems (GIS), used GIS tools to map the arboretum’s grounds.

They walked the trails during the hot Arizona summer and created geographic data for features like valve boxes, filters, water features, drinking fountains and more. In total, they documented 333 items on two of the main hiking trails.

“We prioritized the type of data that they wanted to be collected, like different irrigation and electrical data. It wasn’t a lot of data, but what was collected was important,” Yadavalli said.

The web map includes detailed information on location, sources and sizes for each item and allows users to interact with features on the map, including measuring distances between points as well as adding and deleting items.

“For a student, especially in a one-year program, it’s rare to get real fieldwork experience. We usually only learn and practice in front of the computers,” Lu said. 

“I didn’t know much about Boyce Thompson before this, and it’s amazing, and they were extremely helpful and passionate about the work.”

Before this project, mapping of the arboretum had not been updated since the early 2000s.

“When I began here over two years ago, I asked, as a horticulturist in the area I'm taking care of, is there a map? I'd like to know where the valves are and where the clean outs are and all of that information, and there wasn't,” said Boyce Thompson Horticulture Program Manager Mary Villarreal. “And so just for staff, it's a useful tool to have and have it accessible because GIS is an online program.”

The project and advanced software lay a foundation for further mapping developments, such as clearly indicating the difficulty and accessibility of hiking trails for visitors. The Benson family has funded several paid internships for students to gain fieldwork experience and take part in digital mapping of the arboretum.

Critical funding for student research

Though the arboretum has existed for 100 years, its official partnership with ASU launched only in 2022 . Still, many students in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU have already benefited from the partnership, especially graduate and doctoral students who are eligible to apply for the Bernard “Bill” Benson Research Award .

Arina Melkozernova , an instructional designer at ASU, is studying sunflowers and the connection between their native place and the Indigenous peoples who have preserved them. She just passed her defense this spring for her PhD in comparative culture and language through the School of International Letters and Cultures .

“This is not about just languages of people. This is also about languages of plants,” she said. “Our mission is to preserve those gifts for the next generation.”

Guillermo Ortiz, who graduated in fall 2023 with an MS in biology , is studying lichens, a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a photosynthesizing microbe. He is performing research at the ASU Lichen Herbarium , one of the largest collections of lichenized fungi in the U.S., and is using 3D models to track lichen growth over time.

Annie Weaver-Bryant, a third-year PhD student in environmental life sciences , is studying heat adaptation in peaches at the arboretum, where she planted 30 peach trees.

“My favorite part about growing the trees has been watching them go through all of the life stages as well as watching pollinators interact with them,” Weaver-Bryant said. 

Melkozernova, Ortiz and Weaver-Bryant are each Bernard “Bill” Benson Research Award recipients, or “Benson Scholars.” On March 19, they presented their research at Discovery Day, an event that celebrated the ASU–Boyce Thompson Arboretum partnership and highlighted the research projects currently taking place. 

“It’s great to see so many students benefiting already from this partnership, and it also allows us the opportunity to fulfill part of ASU’s charter , which is to assume responsibility and provide stewardship and support for our local communities,” said Kenro Kusumi , dean of natural sciences at The College. 

“Boyce Thompson Arboretum is such an important part of our community, historically, biologically, geographically and otherwise, so it’s exactly in line with our mission that we support their efforts now, and we hope to continue to expand this partnership in the future.”

More Environment and sustainability

ASU hosts gathering to advance planetary sustainability through education research networks

Representatives of 10 sustainability-oriented research networks recently joined faculty of Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College (MLFTC) to formally launch an international…

Starbucks partnership offers new global experiences for students to study coffee, sustainability in Costa Rica

Before her trip to Hacienda Alsacia, Starbucks' first and only company-owned-and-operated coffee farm, Katie Hogan thought she knew a lot about coffee. A graduate student in Arizona State University…

US-ASEAN Center hosts tour centering environmental biotechnology program

As Arizona State University kicked off this year’s U.S.-ASEAN Science, Technology, and Innovation Cooperation, or STIC, Program study tour, the room was filled with quiet anticipation — each of the…

• Skip to content
• Accessibility Policy
• Oracle blogs
• Lorem ipsum dolor
• Customer Success ,
• Recent Posts ,

Environment Day: Researchers enabling climate preservation

Our world needs transformation. Now is the time for the public and private sectors to take accountability while investing in the innovative solutions that can help address the ongoing environmental crisis.

World Environment Day is a global initiative celebrated on June 5th each year, aiming to raise awareness and inspire action for the protection and preservation of our planet. It serves as a reminder of the crucial role that the environment plays in sustaining life and the urgent need to address environmental challenges such as climate change, deforestation, pollution, and biodiversity loss.

On this day, individuals, communities, organizations, and governments come together to engage in various activities, including tree plantations, clean-up drives, educational campaigns, and policy discussions. World Environment Day serves as a rallying point for collective efforts, encouraging everyone to make sustainable choices and work towards a greener, healthier, and more sustainable future for all.

To celebrate World Environment Day, we’re highlighting some of the Oracle customers forging ahead in the domain of environmental research, creating technology that enables cleaner energy and the preservation of our world.

Royal Holloway & Oracle refine carbon storage to fight climate change

It's now common knowledge that the excessive amount of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in the atmosphere is trapping radiation from the sun, furthering the greenhouse effect and global warming. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a process where CO 2 is captured, usually from industrial facilities, and isolated from the atmosphere. CCS technologies show a lot of promise in reducing carbon emissions and are expected to play a crucial part in meeting future global energy and climate goals.

Ryan Payton recently completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London and is currently working at Oracle. Ryan’s research involved developing a workflow for the preliminary pore scale analysis of potential reservoir sandstones to determine if they can be considered for use as carbon storage reservoirs.

This project directly benefits the reservoir characterization, digital image analysis and CCS communities, since the workflow can be applied to a range of subsurface and microstructural characterization problems. This can be used as a preliminary investigation technique to provide a quick and relatively inexpensive assessment of a reservoir. This workflow should benefit key decision makers, helping to inform where carbon could be stored around the world.

Using Oracle Cloud gave Ryan’s team the freedom to test their workflows on a range of different hardware configurations. The team took advantage of substantial OCI GPU resources to accelerate their geophysical property calculations through proprietary software packages. With these resources, they cut down their run times significantly, taking mere hours instead of days or sometimes weeks. The support provided by the OCI team also made transitioning from on-premises facilities to the cloud a straightforward process.

University of Reading relaunches Fruitwatch.org to continue monitoring UK climate change

Recent research suggests that plants in the UK are flowering too early to achieve healthy pollination. This discrepancy could have devastating consequences – with less pollen and nectar available, insects in the UK may go hungry, hurting their chances of a sustained population. A lack of pollination also means flowers will reproduce less than in recent decades.

To help study this phenomenon further, Oracle helped University of Reading researchers to launch FruitWatch.org in early 2022. This project enjoyed widespread media coverage, being featured in publications like The Guardian. Hosted on Oracle Cloud and compatible with both desktop and mobile devices, this website is an APEX autonomous database application that enables UK citizens to report when and how their fruit trees are flowering.

The team at Reading is comparing these flowering dates to local pollinator records to help them understand whether fruit tree flowering and bee flight dates are in sync across the country, enabling a new, UK-wide assessment of pollination trends. We’re pleased to report that the website captured over 6,000 records in 2022 alone, with every country in the UK taking part.

Dr. Deepa Senapathi, an ecologist at the University of Reading, one of the lead scientists in the FruitWatch project, said, "We had an overwhelmingly positive response to our project last year, which has already contributed to our understanding of the impact of climate change on British fruit, and we are hoping more people will be encouraged to take part in 2023."

The scheme restarted in February 2023 and the team continues to monitor changes and trends in fruit tree flowering dates. This data will be essential in helping scientists develop an understanding of the role climate change has on flowering fruit trees and the ecosystem they help sustain.

Professor James Chong at the University of York investigates anaerobic digestion, a promising sustainable energy source

Many countries have committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2050; this will mean reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and investing in green energy sources to cut emissions and foster a circular economy.

One lesser known but readily available form of green technology is anaerobic digestion (AD). AD is the natural process of breaking down organic materials under anaerobic conditions facilitated by microorganisms. This process produces biogas, which is a renewable energy source. AD enables us to recycle highly abundant waste, such as food and agriculture waste and sewage, into biogas and valuable products like fertilizer.

The microorganisms present in AD are responsible for the production of biogas, so it is necessary to understand which organisms are present in the community and the role they fill. Currently, although we can identify many of the microorganisms that facilitate this process, we are unable to grow or manipulate many of these in the lab. This limits our understanding of how these organisms interact.

Professor James Chong at the University of York will use Oracle Cloud to identify many of the microorganisms present in an AD community, how they interact and what role they fill. The team will also mix organisms to make their own complex synthetic AD community so that they can work out which organisms are essential for stability. Once the researchers have a stable synthetic community, they will use this to improve biogas production and the efficiency of the AD process.

UC Berkeley investigates air pollutants’ impact on SoCal communities Asthma now ranks as one of the most costly chronic diseases, accounting for over $50 billion annually in direct medical expenditures in the U.S. At the same time, evidence shows that nitrogen oxides (NO X ) and fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) can exacerbate asthma symptoms and generate substantial economic costs. With these factors in mind, Dr. Jason Su’s research team at University of California, Berkeley, decided to investigate whether or not port and locomotion operations directly impact the health of vulnerable communities along their distribution routes.

The team created 4,841 receptors at the residential land use weighted census tract (CT) centroids across the Southern California (SoCal) region. They then estimated monthly pollutant concentrations of NO X and PM 2.5 from port and locomotive operations in SoCal through a Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport (STILT) modeling framework. STILT is widely used to simulate the transport of pollution and greenhouse gases through the atmosphere.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was instrumental to running this STILT model – UC Berkeley researchers used a Virtual Machine (VM) on Oracle Cloud in DenseIO2.24. Their research found that sub-acute respiratory symptoms are statistically associated with air pollution from port crafts and railway locomotives, with per 10 µ g m -3 increases in PM 2.5 concentrations being associated with a 10.86% increase in rescue inhaler use. The team hope that upcoming publications from this project will provide the insights policy makers need to reduce air pollution exposure for disadvantaged communities.

Here at Oracle, we’re proud to be assisting with sustainability tech that could play a major part in the ongoing climate crisis, especially on World Environment Day.

Andrew Bell

Content manager, oracle.

Communication is Andrew’s first passion, having had his academic research and writing published internationally on multiple occasions. Andrew developed his marketing acumen at Switch Automation, Alveo and CACI International, where he delivered a range of technical sales content in a variety of formats and planned, project managed and executed on diverse marketing campaigns. Andrew has nurtured a creative outlook, having edited corporate videos at award-winning film studios in London and produced, shot and edited videos at Switch.

Previous Post

Mount buckets of Oracle Object Storage to compute instances running Ubuntu Linux

5 ways hybrid cloud meets the demands of modern research.

• Analyst Reports
• Cloud Economics
• Corporate Responsibility
• Diversity and Inclusion
• Security Practices
• What is Customer Service?
• What is ERP?
• What is Marketing Automation?
• What is Procurement?
• What is Talent Management?
• What is VM?
• Try Oracle Cloud Free Tier
• Oracle Sustainability
• Oracle COVID-19 Response
• Oracle and SailGP
• Oracle and Premier League
• Oracle and Red Bull Racing Honda
• US Sales 1.800.633.0738
• How can we help?
• Subscribe to Oracle Content
• © 2024 Oracle
• Privacy / Do Not Sell My Info

In the Media

1st friday focus on the environment: the state of the environment as earth day 2024 approaches (wemu).

How are right whales in Cape Cod Bay studied? A day on the research boat Shearwater

CAPE COD BAY — All eyes were on the water.

From inside the cabin of the research vessel Shearwater , Christy Hudak, a research associate with the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, picked up a pair of binoculars and scanned Cape Cod Bay. Interns Morgan Pirozzi and Shreya Vinodh were doing the same from the higher vantage point atop the cabin.

The center’s right whale ecology team was looking for North Atlantic right whales during a trip on Monday. In January, they had spotted the first of the rare cetaceans for the year in the bay.

The team’s goal is to document what the whales are eating and which individual whales are present. But even what they aren’t eating may be important.

“We’re going to be looking at the plankton and finding out what the right whales are feeding on and what they’re not feeding on,” Hudak said.

The large whales return from their southern winter habitat to feed on tiny prey — calanus, pseudocalanus, and centropages — crustaceans known as copepods, a species of zooplankton.

Plankton nets are deployed to collect samples. Some are dragged behind the boat, following the path of a whale that was skim feeding. A vertical tow is lowered into the water to determine how deep in the water column the food source is.   

Early morning departure

The research vessel had left MacMillian Pier in Provincetown earlier in the morning, making its way out of the harbor and around Long Point Light. After finding no whales around the Cape’s sandy tip, the Shearwater cut across the bay to locations where there had been sightings reported earlier. After more than an hour, the crew spotted their first right whale of the day, one of about 19 that were documented during the nearly nine-hour trip.

Researchers document the number of whales, their behavior and if they’re feeding, Pirozzi said. Salinity and water temperature is recorded and photos are taken of the whales.

“I use my photo documentation not only to identify the whales but for our health assessment,” Pirozzi said. “We photograph the whole body, any new scars they may have, whether they look skinny or healthy.”

The whales may have identifying marks and features, whether it’s a scar on its body or the unique pattern of callosities on their head.

How to find a right whale?

Locating the whales can be as simple as seeing them swim by with their mouths open, filter feeding zooplankton just below the water’s surface before they slip back under water, sometimes showing off flukes, or tail, as they dive deeper. They could be located by the sound or the sight of them exhaling through their blowholes. Another sign of whales are the “footprints” left behind by the movement of their flukes that create a circular pattern in the water as they move.

Scientists estimate there are about 356 of these critically endangered whales. By identifying the whales, researchers can track them through their lives. During the 2022-23 season, 198 individual right whales were identified in an around Cape Cod Bay by the Provincetown-based team. This season, the team has observed 123 individual right whales in the bay, according to a statement from the center.

A mother and calf north of Marshfield

For the first time this season, aerial observers from the center on Monday saw a right whale with her calf just north of Marshfield. They were identified as 36-year-old Legato and her daughter, Staccato. The calf was born in December and the two whales were first sighted together New Year’s Eve by Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.

“We were just finishing a survey track line when we saw a right whale feeding less than a mile from the beach off North Marshfield,” center aerial observer and right whale researcher Ryan Schosberg said in the statement. “We flew over to document the animal and all cheered in excitement when a little calf popped up by its side! It’s always a relief to see right whale mothers arriving safely in Cape Cod Bay with their calves.”

The right whale team will continue to monitor by boat and plane the migration of the right whales. Most of the sightings happen in March and April. At times, the whales can be seen from shore, particularly on Provincetown’s beaches.

Thanks to our subscribers, who help make this coverage possible. If you are not a subscriber, please consider supporting quality local journalism with a Cape Cod Times subscription.  Here are our subscription plans.    

YSE Research Day

2024 research day.

The 40th YSE Research Day takes place on April 12, 2024

Research Day is our yearly opportunity to showcase the diverse, multidisciplinary research conducted at the Yale School of the Environment.

Students and presenters: Once you have logged in ,  you can submit an abstract by clicking on the link in your personal sidebar menu.

Research center weighs in on potential environmental impacts from Baltimore bridge collapse

WASHINGTON (Gray DC) - As the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse clean up begins on the Patapsco River in Baltimore, questions about the potential for pollution and other environmental impacts from the collapse are looming.

The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science said on Tuesday that the immediate effects are likely minimal. However, the research center’s Interim President Bill Dennison said that they are concerned about what could happen when the ship and the collapsed bridge are removed.

“We are looking at air, water and land impacts, particularly concerned about the disturbance of sediments,” said Dennison.

He said that the research center is working with local officials to offer their expertise as the cleanup begins.

Dennison added that fish and wildlife could be impacted by the removal of debris when toxic sediment is stirred up as the debris removal begins, and dredging could also impact them.

“Baltimore has a long history of industrial development and as a result, there are a lot of contaminants in the Baltimore sediments,” said Dennison.

A release from the center also indicated that some animals like dolphins could affected if pile driving occurs when the bridge is rebuilt because they are very sensitive to sound, and could be driven away.

Increased carbon dioxide emissions are also a concern.

“Ships are going to be rerouted and have to go to different ports,” said Dennison. “The trucks that normally use the key bridge, particularly in going through the Beltway, will be diverted and have more miles… so we’re going to end up with more emissions.”

Dennison said several precautions are being taken by the local and federal partners involved in the cleanup. And said that the research center will do as much as they can to assist with minimizing the environmental impacts.

“No red flags at this point. But but we’re not going to stop watching.”

Copyright 2024 Gray DC. All rights reserved.

80-year-old Toledo man killed after driving wrong way, crashing into car on I-280

First Alert Weather Day issued for strong storms Tuesday PM

21-year-old Napoleon woman killed in Friday crash

Teacher faces termination after calling in sick for 2 days to attend a concert in Nashville, district says

13-year-old girl accused of killing mom after her phone was taken away, police say

Latest news.

Family of 18-year-old with cancer praying that $50,000 treatment saves his life

Millions across America prepare for solar eclipse viewing

Hollywood Minute: Beyoncé's country album debuts at No. 1

Florida voters explain how abortion debate plays into their choice in 2024 election

Trump says he’ll announce his position on abortion Monday, a key moment in the presidential race

Fight coronavirus (COVID-19) transmission at home

Used properly, most common household disinfectants will kill the virus that causes COVID-19.

Getting your COVID-19 vaccine is the best way to lower your risk of serious illness. Getting the vaccine also prevents the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

In addition to the vaccine there are other actions you can take to keep this coronavirus from spreading in your home. Wash your hands well and often to lower your risk of infection. Improving air flow in your home and filtering the air can help. And for the coronavirus and other germs, clean those high-touch surfaces in your home and disinfect them when needed.

What's the difference between cleaning and disinfecting?

Cleaning removes most germs and dust or dirt. Disinfecting kills most germs. If someone in your home has COVID-19, clean first, then disinfect.

How is COVID-19 spread?

The virus that causes COVID-19 spreads mainly from person to person. It can spread from people who are infected but have no symptoms. When people with COVID-19 cough, sneeze, breathe, sing or talk, the virus carried on their breath can land on the faces of people nearby. The virus spreads when other people breathe in infected droplets or when the droplets land in their eyes, noses or mouths.

The COVID-19 virus also can spread if people touch their eyes, noses or mouths after touching a surface with the virus on it. Without cleaning and disinfection, the COVID-19 virus may stay on surfaces from hours to days. But the risk of COVID-19 through contact with infected surfaces seems low.

How can I clean and disinfect my home?

You can lower the risk of spreading of the COVID-19 virus by focusing on surfaces that are touched often. Examples are tables, doorknobs, light switches, handles, counters, desks, toilets, faucets and sinks. Clean these things with soap and water or with a product made for the specific surface. Follow the instructions on the product label.

Most often, cleaning is enough to lower the risk. Clean more often if someone in your home is at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

If someone who is sick with COVID-19 lives with you or has been in your home within the last 24 hours, disinfect surfaces right after cleaning them. Disinfecting helps kill germs that are left.

Disinfecting uses strong chemicals.

Read product labels before use and follow instructions carefully. Many disinfectants need to stay on surfaces for some time to work. This is called the contact time, and the label will tell you that length of time.

Put on gloves before disinfecting. Disposable gloves are best because you can throw them away when you're done. If you have only gloves that you reuse, don't use them for anything else. Wash your hands well with soap and water for 20 seconds right after cleaning and disinfecting.

Keep doors or windows open and use a fan to help increase air flow while disinfecting your home.

What disinfectants kill COVID-19?

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a list of disinfectants for use against COVID-19. Look for products with active ingredients such as ethanol, hydrogen peroxide or quaternary ammonium. In the U.S., check labels for EPA registration numbers.

Does bleach work against COVID-19?

Yes. You can make a disinfecting solution by mixing 4 teaspoons (about 20 milliliters) of household bleach and 1 quart (a bit less than 1 liter) of water.

Read and follow instructions on your bottle of bleach. It's also important to wear gloves and make sure there's good airflow in the room. Don't mix bleach with ammonia or any other cleanser because mixing can cause toxic fumes.

How can I disinfect phones and other electronics?

Cellphones are high-touch devices that can carry COVID-19 germs. Follow makers' advice for cleaning and disinfecting them and other electronics. You also may consider covering your phone or shared electronics, such as a keyboard, with a product that can be easily disinfected.

Protect yourself every day

As you touch people, surfaces and objects throughout the day, you get germs on your hands. You can infect yourself with these germs by touching your eyes, nose or mouth.

To protect yourself, wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. If there's no soap and water, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol.

• When and how to clean and disinfect your home. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/hygiene/cleaning/cleaning-your-home.html. Accessed Feb. 28, 2024.
• McIntosh K. COVID-19: Epidemiology, virology, and prevention. https://www.uptodate.com/contents/search. Accessed Feb. 28, 2024.
• Smith BA. COVID-19: Infection prevention for persons with SARS-CoV-2 infection. https://www.uptodate.com/contents/search. Accessed Feb. 28, 2024.
• COVID-19: How to protect yourself and others. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/prevention.html. Accessed Feb. 28, 2024.
• Cleaning and disinfecting: Best practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. Environmental Protection Agency. https://www.epa.gov/coronavirus/cleaning-and-disinfecting-best-practices-during-covid-19-pandemic. Accessed Feb. 28, 2024.
• List N advanced search page: Disinfectants for coronavirus (COVID-19). https://www.epa.gov/coronavirus/list-n-advanced-search-page-disinfectants-coronavirus-covid-19. Accessed Feb. 28, 2024.

Products and Services

• A Book: Endemic - A Post-Pandemic Playbook
• Begin Exploring Women's Health Solutions at Mayo Clinic Store
• A Book: Future Care
• Antibiotics: Are you misusing them?
• COVID-19 and vitamin D
• Convalescent plasma therapy
• Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
• COVID-19: How can I protect myself?
• Herd immunity and coronavirus
• COVID-19 and pets
• COVID-19 and your mental health
• COVID-19 antibody testing
• COVID-19, cold, allergies and the flu
• COVID-19 drugs: Are there any that work?
• Long-term effects of COVID-19
• COVID-19 tests
• COVID-19 in babies and children
• Coronavirus infection by race
• COVID-19 travel advice
• COVID-19 vaccine: Should I reschedule my mammogram?
• COVID-19 vaccines for kids: What you need to know
• COVID-19 vaccines
• COVID-19 variant
• COVID-19 vs. flu: Similarities and differences
• COVID-19: Who's at higher risk of serious symptoms?
• Debunking coronavirus myths
• Different COVID-19 vaccines
• Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO)
• Fever: First aid
• Fever treatment: Quick guide to treating a fever
• Honey: An effective cough remedy?
• How do COVID-19 antibody tests differ from diagnostic tests?
• How to take your pulse
• How to measure your respiratory rate
• How to take your temperature
• How well do face masks protect against COVID-19?
• Is hydroxychloroquine a treatment for COVID-19?
• Loss of smell
• Mayo Clinic Minute: You're washing your hands all wrong
• Mayo Clinic Minute: How dirty are common surfaces?
• Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C)
• Nausea and vomiting
• Pregnancy and COVID-19
• Safe outdoor activities during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Safety tips for attending school during COVID-19
• Sex and COVID-19
• Shortness of breath
• Thermometers: Understand the options
• Treating COVID-19 at home
• Unusual symptoms of coronavirus
• Vaccine guidance from Mayo Clinic
• Watery eyes

Related information

• COVID-19 vaccines: Get the facts
• How well do face masks protect against coronavirus?
• Post-COVID Recovery

News on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Learn the latest medical news about COVID-19 on Mayo Clinic News Network.

• Fight coronavirus COVID-19 transmission at home

Your gift holds great power – donate today!

Make your tax-deductible gift and be a part of the cutting-edge research and care that's changing medicine.

• Campus News
• Student News
• UK HealthCare
• UK Happenings
• Arts & Culture
• Professional News

Is daylight saving time hurting your retirement portfolio? Study from UK researcher says yes

On this edition of "Behind the Blue," UKNow and Tyler Kleppe, assistant professor in UK Gatton College, discuss how "springing forward" as part of daylight saving time impacts high stakes financial decisions. You can listen to the full interview by clicking the play button above.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 5, 2024) — Every year, more than 97% of Americans, and more than 1.6 billion people worldwide, move their clocks forward one hour in the spring — allowing for more evening light as part of daylight saving time (DST).

Sure, that “spring forward” might make you more noticeably tired and cranky. But time is more than just numbers on a clock — it's a force that shapes our days, our routines and even our well-being.

And according to Tyler Kleppe’s new research, that heavy-eyed feeling doesn’t just impact simple day-to-day tasks.

In fact, the assistant professor in the Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky , has shown losing that hour is also affecting higher stakes decisions — like investing for one’s retirement.

“Even if you're not directly involved in capital markets, our financial system is relevant to all of us,” Kleppe said. “That’s why it remains important to evaluate regulatory actions and continue asking if they are effective.”

A number of studies show that DST transitions can negatively impact decision-making processes due to the disturbance they have on our circadian rhythm.

For example, research finds people experience more pronounced mood swings. There are also more serious consequences, such as an increase in car accidents and an uptick in health complications.

But little is known about the influence on financial markets.

“Really the core question we're exploring here is: can that disruption impact how investors respond to firms’ earnings disclosures?” Kleppe explained. “Then, we can have one more piece of evidence to help inform the national debate surrounding daylight saving time.”

Kleppe’s research closely examines how DST transitions impact investors’ reactions to corporate earnings news.

He said, it’s important to note, the DST jump takes place the second week of March during spring earnings season — a period when many public firms disclose value-relevant earning information to investors.

To further investigate the relation between DST transitions and investor information processing, Kleppe and his co-authors examined quarterly earnings announcements made by U.S. firms from 2007-2018 under the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

“We looked at the trades of investors immediately following the disclosure of earnings,” he said. “The idea is, if the earnings news is positive, then investors will buy more stock. However, if the earnings news is negative, or lower than expected, then investors would sell more of the stock.”

However, the research finds relatively muted effects to corporate earnings announcements in the days following our collective spring forward. Kleppe notes this can be explained by the lower information processing abilities associated with the time change.

“Basically, investors are going to respond less to earnings. So, they don't respond as they ‘quote unquote’ should — or that we would expect they would — under normal circumstances, which has implications for your investment returns.”

According to the findings, the impact is more apparent among firms with investors who are more likely to be trading on earnings news and among firms with less sophisticated investors.

“If you have a brokerage account, for example, an E -Trade account, a Robinhood account, and you're just making trades here and there, you're a retail investor. Typically, these investors tend to be a little less sophisticated,” Kleppe continued. “Because the retail investors have fewer protocols and procedures in place to protect against cognitive disruptions, they are seemingly most affected by the time change.”

Equipped with the results of Kleppe’s research, the question becomes, should Kentucky continue to follow daylight saving time?

It’s seemingly been on lawmakers’ minds for several years.

The  Uniform Time Act  of 1966 mandates the use of DST throughout the country. However, it allows states to opt-out and stay on standard time year-round. Currently, only two states do not observe DST (Arizona and Hawaii). However, the U.S. Congress, and at least 19 state legislatures, are considering legislation to eliminate DST transitions.

According to the  National Conference of State Legislatures , three pieces of legislation regarding changes to DST policy in Kentucky failed in 2020.

In 2022, the Kentucky House of Representatives urged Congress to permanently adopt daylight saving time by passing the Sunshine Protection Act. But two other House Resolutions failed.

In 2023, a measure was introduced in the Kentucky House to make DST year-round if the Uniform Time Act of 1966, or the Standard Time Act of 1918, are amended by Congress. That measure also failed.

Most recently, another bill was introduced in the Kentucky House that would exempt Kentucky from the use of DST and keep the state on standard time year-round.

“Regardless, it’s important to understand, these transitions really appear to have a significant impact on our physical, mental, financial health and everything in between,” Kleppe continued. “And we hope this research can be informative to current legislative discussions — both at the state and federal levels.”

As the debate continues, Kleppe is encouraging investors not to make major decisions in the days following the time change. He also hopes to spark an even larger conversation around why business research matters.

“Hopefully, we are kick-starting more exploration in this area. One paper is certainly not enough,” he said. “There's a lot of different areas that can be studied to give a more well-rounded picture of how daylight saving time transitions can and does impact all of us, and business research has an important role to play.”

You can listen to the full interview with Kleppe on "Behind the Blue" by clicking the play button above.

"Behind the Blue" is available on iTunes, Google Play and Spotify. Become a subscriber to receive new episodes of “Behind the Blue” each week. UK’s latest medical breakthroughs, research, artists and writers will be featured, along with the most important news impacting the university.

You can also learn more about Kleppe and his research  here , and you can find more information about Gatton College here .

As the state’s flagship, land-grant institution, the University of Kentucky exists to advance the Commonwealth. We do that by preparing the next generation of leaders — placing students at the heart of everything we do — and transforming the lives of Kentuckians through education, research and creative work, service and health care. We pride ourselves on being a catalyst for breakthroughs and a force for healing, a place where ingenuity unfolds. It's all made possible by our people — visionaries, disruptors and pioneers — who make up 200 academic programs, a $476.5 million research and development enterprise and a world-class medical center, all on one campus.   

In 2022, UK was ranked by Forbes as one of the “Best Employers for New Grads” and named a “Diversity Champion” by INSIGHT into Diversity, a testament to our commitment to advance Kentucky and create a community of belonging for everyone. While our mission looks different in many ways than it did in 1865, the vision of service to our Commonwealth and the world remains the same. We are the University for Kentucky.   

Latest Stories

Danceblue 2024 breaks record, raises $2,129,952 for the kids, uk celebrates 30 years of voluntary faculty program, annual conference, uk health sciences faculty, physician team up to create app for instant nutritional support, mayor proclaims april as john p. wyatt, m.d., environment and health awareness month, eclipse glasses mislabeled and should not be used to view eclipse.

• Frontiers in Horticulture
• Olericulture
• Research Topics

Light Application in Controlled Environment Horticulture

Total Downloads

Total Views and Downloads

About this Research Topic

During the last decades, there is a strong trend toward growing crops in controlled environments, which has numerous advantages over traditional cultivations such as higher yield, healthier goods, and effective resource usage. The difficulties and optimization of artificial light application have become a popular area of horticultural research. The use of light in controlled environment horticulture (CEH) has drawn interest from both the research and business sectors. Because of the lack of natural sunlight in indoor horticulture (also known as vertical farming or plant factories), artificial light is the only source that influences plant growth and productivity. Utilizing additional light in greenhouses increases crop productivity and quality due to light shortages throughout the autumn and winter months in many countries in the northern hemisphere. Assimilation light is typically used in certain situations to regulate both photoperiod and light intensity and more recently the quality of light attracted lots of attention. Commercially available artificial light sources include the recently developed light-emitting diodes (LEDs) bring us many opportunities for growing plants indoors. Given their many advantages, LEDs have seen a surge in relevance and market share in recent years and the utilization of LEDs in controlled environments is developing day by day. There is currently a knowledge gap about the cost-effective implementation of the best lighting recipe for plant growth and productivity, which restricts the widespread use of artificial lighting. Additionally, in order to maintain a greater yield and high-quality product, managing or altering the intensity and quality of light received by the crop canopy is a crucial issue in controlled environment crop production. Advancing our knowledge for the application of light in controlled environments is of crucial importance nowadays. This research topic aimed to cover the advantages, challenges, and opportunities for the application of light in controlled environments. In this Research Topic, Original Research, Perspectives, Systematic Reviews, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Methods, Opinions, Hypotheses and Theory, Brief Research Report, papers that targeted the application of light (natural or artificial lighting) on horticultural crop production and quality would be targeted. We welcome articles that focus on (but are not limited to) the following topics: • Light quality effects on crop production and quality in controlled environments • Light recipes for growing plants in controlled environments • Photoperiod, intensity, and daily light integral application in controlled environments • Plant physiology under different lighting environments • Quality of horticultural products as influenced by lighting environment in preharvest or postharvest • Simulation and modeling of lighting environment for crop production

Keywords : Light, Light-Intensity, Light Quality, LED, Controlled Environments, Indoor Horticulture

Important Note : All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

Topic Editors

Topic coordinators, submission deadlines, participating journals.

Manuscripts can be submitted to this Research Topic via the following journals:

total views

• Demographics

No records found

total views article views downloads topic views

Top countries

Top referring sites, about frontiers research topics.

With their unique mixes of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author.