Having citizenship in a country not only means holding a passport from that country and having the right to live, work and vote there. Being a citizen means having rights, duties and responsibilities. Citizenship in any community means actively participating in the life of that community.

Participation in community life can take many forms. In addition to voting, citizens of a country have the right to be informed about the affairs of the community and to participate in the decision-making process. Citizens have of course the responsibility to obey laws, to respect the rights of others, to care for the well-being of the community, to take initiatives for development and to protect the environmental resources on which all depend for a living. After all, as several UNEP staff members used to say (jokingly) to visiting business people : ?There is no market where you can buy another planet !?.

ENVIRONMENTAL CITIZENSHIP (EC) similarly carries the notion that we have side by side both the rights to enjoy and benefit from the environment and responsibilities for its protection, enhancement and rational utilization.

Being an environmental citizen means having the knowledge, motivation and commitment to working individually and collectively toward sustaining a healthy environment. Environmental citizens are those people, communities, and organisations who are informed about their place in the biosphere, and who act responsibly on this basis. Although governments have an important role to play, our goals cannot be realised by government action alone. Environmental citizenship is about doing purposeful right actions, not just about learning, especially if such learning is cut off from active daily life.

WHO CAN BE AN ENVIRONMENTAL CITIZEN? ALL individuals, communities, and organisations can be environmentally responsible. Everyone can have a role to play in the effort to achieve the goal defined at the UN World Summit in Johannesburg in 2002, namely to have ?a clean smiling Earth by the year 2020?.

WHAT CAN BE DONE. Humans,once considered to be the only creatures wise enough to alter the environment for our convenience, have turned out also to be the only ones insane enough to demolish it! Hence the necessity of EC. From 2000 up to now and for a few more years to come (up to 2010) humanity has been striving to bring the world well into the 21st century and the third millennium, with, amongst other things, a campaign to make potential citizens aware of their environmental privileges and responsibilities while putting EC into practice by taking action daily and empowering others to do so. For example the remarkable meeting of the IPCC in Paris last week, where scientists, industrialists, politicians and activists-not to mention the press and the public- got together to seriously tackle global warming and the consequential climate change.

WHAT YOU CAN DO. At home tonight switch off one light which is not in direct use. Economise 40 watts, your drop in the ocean, but just imagine 5 billion people doing the same, daily!

Michael ATCHIA (Co-responsible, from 1986 to 1996, for the UNESCO-UNEP International Environmental Education Programme, active in 140 countries)