A 'Little Prince' and 8 billion gardeners to our rescue

Have you ever looked at your house and thought, "This place needs a complete makeover?" You know the drill—pack your bags, move to a hotel, let the professionals work their magic, and return to your freshly renovated paradise.

- SAMIRAN GHOSH

Have you ever looked at your house and thought, "This place needs a complete makeover?" You know the drill—pack your bags, move to a hotel, let the professionals work their magic, and return to your freshly renovated paradise. Simple. Now, let's apply that same logic to Earth. Maybe what works for a three-bedroom apartment in downtown Mumbai will work perfectly for an entire planet.

But hold on. Why do we need to do this at all? Because every minute, we dump a garbage truck's worth of plastic into our oceans, a trend set to reach 29 million tonnes annually by 2040. In 2023, the world's tree-cover loss was equivalent to losing an area larger than New Zealand within the span of just one year—or 28 trees per minute. At this pace, by 2030, our planet will retain just 10% of its forests. Picture a 100-page book of Earth's forests—we're about to rip out 90 pages of it. The clock is ticking, and the time for action is now.

Our carbon footprint is equally troubling. In 2023, we hit a record 37.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions—enough to fill 7.5 billion hot-air balloons. The increase in 2022 alone added the weight of 2,050 Empire State Buildings to our atmosphere. Worse still, the issues are interlinked in a complex web of cause-and-effect.