ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.pptx

PPTX

1. ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

2. The Worlds Leading Environmental Problems The Conserve Energy Future website lists the following environmental challenges that the world faces today.

3. 1. The depredation caused by industrial and transportation toxins and plastic in the ground; the defiling of the sea, rivers, and water beds by oil spills and acid rain; the dumping of urban waste . 2. Changes in global weather patterns ( flash floods, extreme, snowstorms, and the spread of deserts) and the surge in ocean and land temperatures leading to a rise in sea levels ( as the polar ice caps melt because of the weather ), plus the flooding of many lowland areas across the world.

4. 3. Overpopulation 4. The exhaustion of the world’s natural non-renewable resources from oil reserves to minerals to potable water. 5. A waste disposal catastrophe due to excessive amount of waste (from plastic to food packages to electronic waste) unloaded by communities in landfills as well as on the ocean; and the dumping of nuclear waste.

5. 6. The destruction of million-year-old ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity (destruction of the coral reefs and massive deforestation) that have led to the extinction of particular species and the decline in the umber of others. 7. The reduction of oxygen and the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of deforestation, resulting in the rise in ocean acidity by as much as 150 percent in the last 250 years. 8. The depletion of the ozone layer protecting the planet from the sun’s deadly ultraviolet rays due to chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) in the atmosphere .

6. 9. Deadly acid rain as a result of fossil fuel combustion, toxic chemicals from erupting volcanoes, and the massive rotting vegetables filling up garbage dumps or left on the streets. 10. Water pollution arising from industrial and community waste residues seeping into underground water tables, rivers and seas. 11. Urban sprawls that continue to expand as a city turns into a megalopolis , destroying farmlands, increasing traffic gridlock, and making smog cloud a permanent urban fixture.

7. 12. Pandemics and other threats to public health arising from wastes mixing with drinking water, polluted environment that become breeding grounds for mosquitoes and disease carrying rodents, and pollution. 13. A radical alteration of food systems because of genetic modifications in food production . Many of these problems are caused by natural changes Volcanic eruptions release toxins in the atmosphere and lower the worlds temperature.

8. Man-made pollution Peoples health has been severely compromised. An archived article in the journal Scientific American blamed the pollution each year at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. The International Agency for Research on Cancer blamed air pollution for 223,000 lung cancer deaths in 2010. In Indonesia and Malaysia, the link between forest fire and mortality had been well-established. The aforementioned coal mining in West Virginia has also made people sick, some with “ rare cancers”, little kids with kidney stones and premature deaths; and children born with congenital disabilities and adults having shorter life expectancy.

9. It has been the poor who are most severely affected by these environmental problems. Their low income and poverty already put them at a disadvantage by not having the resource to afford good health care, to live in unpolluted areas, to eat healthy food, etc.. In India, studies on adults health revealed that 46% in Delhi and 56% of in Calcutta have “impaired lung function” due to air pollution.

10. Marife Ballesteros concludes that this unhealthy environment “ deepens poverty, increases the vulnerability of both the poor and non-poor living in slums, and excludes the slum poor from growth. One of the major ironies of urban pollution is that the necessities that the poor has access to are also the sources of the problem. The main workhorse of the public transport system is the bus.

11. However, because it runs mainly on diesel fuel, it is now considered “ one of the largest contributors to environmental pollution problems worldwide”. This problem is expected to worsen as the middle classes and the elites buy more cars and as the road systems are improved to give people more chance to travel.

12. CATCHING UP These massive environmental problems are difficult to resolve because government believed that for their countries t become fully developed, they must be industrialized, urbanized, and inhabited by a robust middle class with access to the best of modern amenities.

13. If United States lets its environment suffer to achieve modernity and improve the lives of its people, developing countries see no reason, therefore, why they could not sacrifice the environment in the name of progress.

14. The greenhouse effect is responsible for recurring heat waves and long droughts in certain places, as well as for heavier rainfall and devastating hurricanes and typhoons in others. Since human-made climate change threatens the entire world, it is possibly the greatest present risk to humankind.

15. Combating global warming