Nearly 150 world leaders were meeting in Paris, France, at the United Nations’ Conference of the Parties (COP). They were working hard to help solve climate (气候) change. That was an important meeting since so many countries were trying to solve the problem.

【小题1】 It’s kind of like when you have a fever. For you that may mean a day or two of rest. But for the earth the rise in temperature is making ice at the North and South poles melt (融化) more than they should. And the level of the oceans and seas is rising: This breaks the earth’s balance (平衡).

【小题2】 Use of cars, over-use of electricity, too much rubbish, cutting down too many trees and even eating too much meat make the temperature rise. You may not think your daily life can cause such a big problem. But when millions of people are doing them every day for years and years … it adds up.

And it has added up. So the leaders knew they needed to act fast. And since climate change doesn’t stay inside a country, it connects us all. We need to agree on what changes should be made and then keep to the plan.

【小题3】 To make sure that the earth’s temperature doesn’t become 2°C hotter. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. It is believed that if we go past 2°C, the result of climate change can be really bad.

【小题4】

*Remember to turn the lights off at home when you’re not in that room.

*Recycle as much as you can.

*Ride your bike or walk when you can instead of using the car.

【小题5】 So we all have to work hard, act fast and care about our planet.

As a report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization（联合国粮食和农业组织）says, 1.29 million square kilometres of forest, an area almost the same size of South Africa, have been lost from the Earth since 1990. Now the forest loses an area around the size of Panama every year. As the forest becomes smaller, many animals lose their home. Luckily, there are still some people doing their best to save forest. A Brazilian（巴西人）Sebastiao Salgado and his wife Lelia Salgado have spent about 20 years planting forest.

Sebastiao is one of the most famous Brazilian photographers. He traveled all over the world to take photos. When he finally came back home in Brazil in the 1990s, he wasastonished- the forests were once full of wildlife. Now there are no trees here. So Sebastiao decided to do something about it. He believed that he could plant the forest together with his wife. And then his amazing dream began to come true. When they began to do that, all the birds and fish returned.

The couple brought the forest back by planting 4 million young trees. During the following 20 years. Sebastiao and his wife took care of the planted forest. 293 kinds of plants, 172 kinds of birds and other animals came back there. Sebastiao’s dream and hard work is a shining example of saving the nature. The couple show us how quickly the nature can recover(恢复) if we take action. As the saying goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second best time is today.”

We all know there is a problem with plastic pollution. Five trillion plastic bags are used every year. One million plastic drinking bottles are bought every minute.

What if we could use plastic waste to build roads? This is exactly what Toby McCartney has done.

In 2019, McCartney’s UK-based company, MacRebur, built the world’s first plastic road in Elgin town, Scotland. The plastic waste was made into grains and then mixed with biturnen (沥青). The road looks just like any other road. But it has improved strength and is more stretchy (有弹性的) thanks to the plastic.

“Our technology can not only help solve the problem of plastic waste but also produce roads that deal better with changes in the weather, reducing cracks and holes on the roads,” McCartney told the BBC.

McCartney’s idea came from a trip to India. “I saw people in India would put plastic waste into the holes on the roads and burn it. The plastic would melt down and cover the hole,” said McCartney.

“I knew that there must be some similarities between the plastic and biturnen, which both come from oil. That’s how I started to think about mixing them,” he said.

After lots of testing, McCartney found the perfect recipe. And now his company has built many plastic roads around the world, from Australia to Europe. A one-kilometer stretch of roads uses about 684,000 plastic bottles or 1.8 million plastic bags. The road itself can be recycled at the end of its lifetime. The materials can be reused to build new roads.

“We’re just a small part of ending the plastic problems, but it’s nice to be part of it,” McCartney said. “I just don’t want my daughters to live in a world where there are more plastics in our oceans than fish.”