The world is becoming smaller due to the fact of globalisation. It enables people to faster access to technology, improved communication and innovation from various perspectives like economic, political, social and environmental development. However, globalisation has created several area concerns, specifically arguments are occurred in the impact to the environment. For instance, green activists points out that globalisation has had the effect on increasing the consumption of products,
which has the negative impact to the ecological cycle (Pandita, 2018).
On October 22, 2018, a revised rule which regulate climate change were signed by nearly 200 countries in Katowice, Poland called Paris climate agreement. It was the first time that brings the all the parties to the UNFCCC (The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects (United Nations， 2015). The goal of Paris Agreement Central was to strength the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius(United Nations,2015).
From my perspectives, Globalisation has had both positive and negative impact to the environment and related public policies should be formulated to ensure that globalisation works for the environment and lesson or control the negative impact to the environment. Thus the saying that “The price of globalisation is environmental pollution ”is partial.
Environmental Pollution could be mainly defined as “the contamination of the physical and biological components of the earth/atmosphere system to such an extent that normal environmental processes are adversely affected“(Muralikrishna and Manickam, 2017:1-4). Due to the impact of globalisation, with the increasing numbers of world’s population and production, there is a type of pollution which could be found across the countries named transboundary pollution. Transboundary pollution is not a pollution contained by single nation-state, it could travel across national borders in various places, for instance , marine plastics pollution.
According to the Andrady(2011), there is a vast majority of marine plastic pollution derives from land-based source, including through rivers ,oceans, for instance fisheries aquaculture and commercial cruises or private ships. Marine litter plastics, such as agriculture plastics, bottles , bags, food packaging and etc could be found on beaches; seabed; within sediments; floating on the sea surface (Andrady 2011). Statistics shows that there are nearly eight million tonnes of plastic leak to the ocean and the ocean might has already contain over 150,000,000,000 tonnes of plastic production, of which around 250,000 tonnes in total (Conservancy, 2017) .
It negatively effect the economics national-wide and resident of coastal and waterside communities worldwide. Water resource was polluted by those unseen toxic and non-degradable substances would inherently effect the food chain all around world, thus with its consequence to people’s death with disease such as diarrhea, falciparum malaria or dengue and etc. Besides, ocean creatures which accidentally ingest those plastic debris, toxic components could lead to the death of millions of marine animals as well. Furthermore, due to the changed patterns of consumption all around world, a few small and remote countries could not undertake the consequence of its growing populations and increasing urbanisation. More plastics production are produced to cater customers’ demand. Therefore, their original ecosystems has been destroyed ,specifically caused great disaster to the local water resource (Gallagher, 2009).
With the continually increasing boost in plastic consumption and production in globe in relation to wasteful uses, insufficient waste management facilities, especially in developing countries could negatively effect the world’s ecosystem. However, economic globalisation could also bring positive effect to the environment as well.According to Smith’s (2011) perspective on Decoupling Economic Growth from Environmental Pressures, globalisation has shorten the distance between countries and enables goods from various countries to transport faster and cheaper all around the world. It provides a large free market, lots of job opportunities could be created to reduce international poverty.
Stronger trade ties and dependencies between nations could be built for achieving win-win situation. Based on Martin’s (2018)report, though green activist hold the opinion that globalisation gained at the expense of the environment pollution due to the more open economies adopt lax environmental criteria. Opponents believe that globalisation