What is Earth Day? Why is there Earth Day?

Earth Day is celebrated annually to raise awareness and celebrate the environmental movement. Earth Day began in 1970 in the United States and is now celebrated around the world.

What is Earth Day and what is the theme for 2025?

Earth Day is an international day dedicated to our planet. It draws attention to the environment and promotes conservation and sustainable development.

Every year on April 22, about 1 billion people around the world take action to raise awareness about the climate crisis and change their behavior to protect the environment.

Participating in Earth Day can take many forms, including small projects at home or in the classroom, such as planting an herb garden or picking up trash. People also volunteer to plant trees, participate in other eco-initiatives, or join street protests about climate change and environmental degradation.

Official Earth Day campaigns and projects aim to raise environmental awareness and bring together like-minded people or groups to address issues such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, and other challenges.

The global theme for this year's Earth Day is ' Our Power, Our Planet ' - calling on people across the globe to unite behind renewable energy and triple global clean electricity production by 2030.

Experts consider achieving this target crucial to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C.

How did Earth Day start?

Millions of people took to the streets of American cities and towns on April 22, 1970, to protest the damage being done to the planet and its resources.

Against that backdrop, protesters brought New York City's usually busy Fifth Avenue to a halt, while students in Boston staged a "lie-in protest" at Logan Airport.

By this time, the environmental impact of the post-war consumer boom was beginning to be felt. Oil spills, factory pollution, and other ecological threats were on the rise, while few laws were enacted to prevent them.

The protests brought together people from all walks of American society—about 10 percent of the U.S. population—to demonstrate and voice their demands for sustainable change. The Earth Day website calls it the birth of the modern environmental movement.

What led to the street protests in 1970?

Concerned about the growing level of unchecked environmental destruction, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin proposed a series of "teach-ins" at universities across the United States in 1969 to raise awareness of environmental threats.

Nelson joined with Congressman Pete McCloskey and activist Denis Hayes to organize those lectures, but the group soon saw an opportunity to expand the event's appeal beyond students.

The newly named Earth Day protests attracted national media attention and support from some 20 million Americans of all ages, political stripes, occupations, and income groups.

What did the protests achieve?

The Earth Day protests left an indelible mark on American policy. In the late 1970s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was created, and a series of laws were enacted to help protect the environment. These included the National Environmental Education Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Clean Air Act.

Other laws were soon enacted to protect water quality and endangered species, and to control the use of harmful chemicals and pesticides.

When did Earth Day become global?

Earth Day spread beyond the United States in 1990. Some 200 million people from 141 countries joined in a worldwide recycling effort that year, paving the way for the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

This 'Earth Summit', as it was called, led to the formation of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, along with the Commission on Sustainable Development to monitor and report on the implementation of the Earth Summit agreements.

As people become increasingly concerned about the impact of businesses on the natural environment, businesses large and small are beginning to feel pressure to consider sustainability in their operations.

Why is Earth Day important today?

As the millennium approached, the Earth Day movement turned its attention to the growing reality of the impending climate crisis with a clear message to world and corporate leaders: urgent action is needed to address global warming.

This is a message that is even more relevant today. Analysis from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that without immediate action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the world is headed for a temperature increase of 3.2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. This level of warming would be catastrophic for the planet and all life on it, including humans.

The past 10 years, 2015-2024, were the 10 warmest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Last year was likely to be the first calendar year in which the global average temperature was 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – about 1.55°C above the 1850-1900 average.

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks 2025 Report found that environmental risks account for half of the top 10 risks over the next 10 years, with extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and severe changes to Earth's systems being the top three.

Kareem Winters

Update 22 April 2025