World Environment Day 2013: "Think.Eat.Save"

World Environment Day (WED) is observed all over the world on 5th of June every year as an initiative of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) by United Nations Organisation (UNO) in order to create awareness about the environment and environmental concerns among the common people.

Many human behaviors like wastage of water, creating pollution, deforestation, cutting of trees, use of plastic items more which are non-degradable increases the environment degradation. Keeping these things in mind the World Environment day is celebrated globally to focus on the needs which are required for a positive environment and curb the foes of environment.

WED was first established in the year 1972 and first World Environment Day was celebrated in 1973. Like every year, this year also a specific theme has been decided for the day and the theme for World Environment Day 2013 is "Think.Eat.Save" which is being hosted by the Mongolia city.

The theme Think.Eat.Save has been kept as an anti-food waste campaign, which focuses on how to reduce the food wastes all over the world.

According to a survey by UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), around 1.3 billion tonnes of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, per year. Even raw food items are wasted in different handling stages like bad weather conditions, poor use of pest-control transport mishandling, packing and storage etc.

Moreover, 1 in every 7 people in the world go to bed without food and more than 20,000 children under the age of 5 die daily from hunger, the survey says.

This year's theme focuses to reduce food waste in different stages and create a balance in environment. In addition to that, it also lays emphasis to create more awareness and minimize the environment affect through wastage of food.

Top Ten countries that waste food in a year: (Based on OECD Environmental Data) Compendium

• United States of America
• Australia
• Denmark
• Switzerland
• Canada
• Norway
• The Netherlands
• Austria
• The United Kingdom
• Ireland

Although much large number of initiatives has been taken by several organizations across the globe to save the environment in continuation, but this day focuses to create awareness among the common people to take initiative from their side to save the environment.

Various campaigns are run by the different NGOs and agencies on this day to create awareness among people. Street shows are organised to provide information on benefits of afforestation and ill-effects of deforestation, stop using plastics items, encourage use of more paper bags, reduce of food-wastes and cleaning-up campaigns like cleaning of rivers and dumping of waste materials are organised on this day.

In India, various talk shows are organised by different electronic media in a bigger platform to create more awareness among people, giving them messages to stop harming the environment and to take actions in improving the environment.

This day gives a message to people to come together and ensure that their neighborhood is cleaner, greener and less polluted for their health benefit and for positive environment.

List of Previous Years Themes and Hosting Cities of World Environment Day