Category Environtal Studies

WHAT IS DESERTIFICATION?

The process by which natural or human causes reduce the biological productivity of drylands (arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas) is known as desertification, also referred to as desertization. Climate change, deforestation, overgrazing, unsustainable irrigation practices, political instability, poverty, or a combination of these factors generally result in declines in productivity of drylands. Africa has been the continent that is most affected by desertification.

Desertification, in short, is when land that was of another type of biome turns into a desert biome because of changes of all sorts. A huge issue that many countries have is the fact that there are large pockets of land that are going through a process that is known as desertification.

Desertification affects topsoil, groundwater reserves, surface runoff, human, animal, and plant populations. Water scarcity in drylands limits the production of wood, crops, forage, and other services that ecosystems provide to our community.

According to UNESCO, one-third of world’s land surface is threatened by desertification, and across the world, it affects the livelihood of millions of people who depend on the benefits of ecosystems that drylands provide.

Various Causes of Desertification

1. Overgrazing

Animal grazing is a huge problem for many areas that are starting to become desert biomes. If there are too many animals that are overgrazing in certain spots, it makes it difficult for the plants to grow back, which hurts the biome and makes it lose its former green glory.

2. Deforestation

When people are looking to move into an area, or they need trees in order to make houses and do other tasks, then they are contributing to the problems related to desertification. Without the plants (especially the trees) around, the rest of the biome cannot thrive.

3. Farming Practices

Some farmers do not know how to use the land effectively. They may essentially strip the land of everything that it has before moving on to another plot of land. By stripping the soil of its nutrients, desertification becomes more of a reality for the area that is being used for farming.

4. Excessive Use of Fertilizers and Pesticides

The use of excessive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides to maximize their crop yields in the short term often leads to significant damages for the soil.

In the long run, this may turn from arable into arid land over time, and it will no longer be suitable for farming purposes after a few years of excessive farming since the soil has been damaged too much over time.

5. Overdrafting of groundwater

Groundwater is the freshwater found underground and also one of the largest water sources. Over drafting is the process in which groundwater is extracted in excess of the equilibrium yield of the aquifer that is pumping or the excessive pulling up of groundwater from underground aquifers. Its depletion causes desertification.

6. Urbanization and Other Types of Land Development

As mentioned above, development can cause people to go through and kill plant life. It can also cause issues with the soil due to chemicals and other things that may harm the ground. As areas become more urbanized, there are fewer places for plants to grow, thus causing desertification.

7. Climate Change

Climate change plays a huge role in desertification. As the days get warmer and periods of drought become more frequent, desertification becomes more and more eminent.

Unless climate change is slowed down, huge areas of land will become desert; some of those areas may even become uninhabitable as time goes on.

8. Stripping the Land of Resources

If an area of land has natural resources like natural gas, oil, or minerals, people will come and mine it or take it out. This usually strips the soil of nutrients, which in turn kills the plant life, and eventually leads to the process of becoming a desert biome as time goes on.

There are some cases where the land gets damaged because of natural disasters, including drought. In those cases, there isn’t a lot that people can do except work to try and help rehabilitate the land after it has already been damaged by nature.

8. Soil Pollution

Soil pollution is a significant cause of desertification. Most plants are quite sensitive to their natural living conditions. When soil becomes polluted due to various human activities, the respective area of land may suffer from desertification in the long run. Higher the level of pollution more will be the degradation of soil over time.

9. Overpopulation and excessive consumption

Since our world population is continuously growing, the demand for food and material goods is also increasing at an alarming rate. Our overall level of consumption is also increasing at a steady rate.

Thus to fulfill our demand, we have to optimize our farming processes to harvest even higher crop yields. However, this excessive optimization of farming will hurt the soil and will eventually turn into the desertification of land in the long run.

10. Mining

Mining is another big reason for desertification. Large amounts of resources have to be extracted by industries to meet our demand for material goods. For mining, large areas of land have to be used, which causes deforestation as well as pollution of the nearby areas.

By the time most of the natural resources have been extracted, and mining practices are no more profitable, the soil gets damaged significantly, and the land becomes arid, which may not be recoverable, and desertification occurs.

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WHAT IS DEFORESTATION?


The intentional clearing of forested land is called deforestation. Throughout history and into current times, forests have been cleared in order to convert the forest land to farms, ranches, or urban uses. While deforestation has greatly changed the world’s landscapes, the greatest concentration of deforestation today is taking place in tropical rainforests. Deforestation not only results in more carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere, but also threatens the world’s biodiversity as these forests are usually home to many species of plants and animals.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defines deforestation as the conversion of forest to other land uses (regardless of whether it is human-induced). “Deforestation” and “forest area net change” are not the same: the latter is the sum of all forest losses (deforestation) and all forest gains (forest expansion) in a given period. Net change, therefore, can be positive or negative, depending on whether gains exceed losses, or vice versa.

The removal of trees without sufficient reforestation has resulted in habitat damage, biodiversity loss, and aridity. Deforestation causes extinction, changes to climatic conditions, desertification, and displacement of populations, as observed by current conditions and in the past through the fossil record. Deforestation also reduces biosequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, increasing negative feedback cycles contributing to global warming. Global warming also puts increased pressure on communities who seek food security by clearing forests for agricultural use and reducing arable land more generally. Deforested regions typically incur significant other environmental effects such as adverse soil erosion and degradation into wasteland.

The resilience of human food systems and their capacity to adapt to future change is linked to biodiversity – including dryland-adapted shrub and tree species that help combat desertification, forest-dwelling insects, bats and bird species that pollinate crops, trees with extensive root systems in mountain ecosystems that prevent soil erosion, and mangrove species that provide resilience against flooding in coastal areas.] With climate change exacerbating the risks to food systems, the role of forests in capturing and storing carbon and mitigating climate change is important for the agricultural sector.

Credit : Wikipedia

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What is climate change and how is it changing?

The long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns is referred to as climate change. While these shifts have been natural for the longest period of humanity, human activities have become the main driver of climate change since the 1800s. This is mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal oil and gas, which then produces heat-trapping gases to alter the delicate equilibrium governing the Earth in a negative fashion.

What Causes Climate Change?

There are lots of factors that contribute to Earth’s climate. However, scientists agree that Earth has been getting warmer in the past 50 to 100 years due to human activities.

Certain gases in Earth’s atmosphere block heat from escaping. This is called the greenhouse effect. These gases keep Earth warm like the glass in a greenhouse keeps plants warm.

Human activities — such as burning fuel to power factories, cars and buses — are changing the natural greenhouse. These changes cause the atmosphere to trap more heat than it used to, leading to a warmer Earth.

When human activities create greenhouse gases, Earth warms. This matters because oceans, land, air, plants, animals and energy from the Sun all have an effect on one another. The combined effects of all these things give us our global climate. In other words, Earth’s climate functions like one big, connected system.

Thinking about things as systems means looking for how every part relates to others. NASA’s Earth observing satellites collect information about how our planet’s atmosphere, water and land are changing.

By looking at this information, scientists can observe how Earth’s systems work together. This will help us understand how small changes in one place can contribute to bigger changes in Earth’s global climate.

Credit : Climate kids 

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WHAT IS CHLOROFLUOROCARBONS?

Any of several organic compounds composed of carbon, fluorine, and chlorine, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCS) are non-toxic non-flammable chemicals. If it contains hydrogen in place of one of the chlorines, they are called hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCS) Originally developed as refrigerants in the 1930s. CFCs gained commercial and industrial value as they found use in the manufacture of aerosol sprays, solvents and foam-blowing agents. CFCS, however, were eventually discovered to pose an environmental threat at a serious: level as they contribute to the depletion of the ozone layer and hence are being phased out throughout the world.

What are the applications of CFC?

Chlorofluorocarbons are used in a variety of applications because of their low toxicity, reactivity and flammability. Every permutation of fluorine, chlorine and hydrogen-based on methane and ethane has been examined and most have been commercialized.

Furthermore, many examples are known for higher numbers of carbon as well as related compounds containing bromine. Uses include refrigerants, blowing agents, propellants in medicinal applications and degreasing solvents.

How do CFCs impact the environment?

However, the atmospheric impacts of CFCs are not limited to their role as ozone-depleting chemicals. Infrared absorption bands prevent heat at that wavelength from escaping the earth’s atmosphere. CFCs have their strongest absorption bands from C-F and C-Cl bonds in the spectral region of 7.8–15.3 µm—referred to as “atmospheric window” due to the relative transparency of the atmosphere within this region.

The strength of CFC absorption bands and the unique susceptibility of the atmosphere at wavelengths where CFCs (indeed all covalent fluorine compounds) absorb creates a “super” greenhouse gas (GHG) effect from CFCs and other unreactive fluorine-containing gases such as perfluorocarbons, HFCs, HCFCs, bromofluorocarbons.

Use of certain chloroalkanes as solvents for large-scale application, such as dry cleaning, have been phased out, for example, by the IPPC directive on greenhouse gases in 1994 and by the volatile organic compounds (VOC) directive of the European Union in 1997. Permitted chlorofluoro alkane uses are medicinal only.

According to scientific communities, the hole in the ozone layer has begun to recover as a result of CFC bans. India is one of the few countries that are pioneers in the use of non-Ozone Depleting technologies and have a low Global Warming Potential (GWP).

Credit : BYJUS.com 

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WHAT IS BIODIVERSITY?

Biodiversity is the name we give to the variety of all life on Earth. Bacteria to baboons, plants to people – the range of life on our planet is incredible.

All living things exist within their own communities, or ecosystems – oceans, forests, deserts, ice caps and even cities. All this put together is biodiversity: the volume of life on Earth as well as how different species interact with each other and with the physical world around them.

The word biodiversity is a contraction of ‘biological diversity’. The concept is broad and complex, but that complexity is what makes Earth a perfect place for humans to live.

Biodiversity and species richness

When we talk about biodiversity, we often talk about species richness as well. Species richness is the number of different species in an area, a way of measuring biodiversity.

Studying species richness helps us to understand the differences between places and areas.

For example, the Amazon rainforest very species-rich as it is home to 10 million species. In contrast, the Sahara Desert is far less rich, with just a few thousand species.

About 1.5 million species have been described by scientists, and most of them are insects. But it is thought that there are millions more sharing our planet with us.

Endangered species and mass extinction

Overall biodiversity loss can speed up extinction. More and more animals and plants are facing an uncertain future.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is the global authority on the status of the natural world. It keeps a Red List of endangered species, an important indicator of the health of the world’s biodiversity.

Currently, more than 30,000 species are listed as threatened with extinction, which is 27% of all assessed species.

We know that millions of species have already gone extinct over the long history of planet Earth. Biodiversity rates have always ebbed and flowed. In fact, at least 99% of all the organisms that have ever lived are now extinct. Researchers agree that five huge mass extinction events have already happened, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

However, extinction rates have been accelerating as human populations continue to grow, and many scientists argue we are living through a sixth mass extinction. This time, humans rather than natural events are to blame. Species diversity in more than half of land ecosystems is now critically low.

A 20% drop is widely considered the threshold at which biodiversity’s contribution to ecosystem services is compromised. It’s estimated that over a quarter of Earth’s land surface has already exceeded this.

Causes of biodiversity loss

Biodiversity is in trouble in the UK and across the globe, and its loss can refer to local and worldwide extinctions. Species and ecosystems can be fragile, so small changes can have large consequences.

The causes of biodiversity loss are complicated, but we know the human population is making the problems worse.

In the short time humans have been on the planet we have increasingly disrupted the balance of biodiversity through changing land use, overexploitation of resources and the impact we are having on climate.

We are converting natural habitats into farms, factories, roads and cities. In the ocean, we are overfishing, drilling and mining.

Cities and towns have a smoothing effect on biodiversity, tending to favour generalist species like feral pigeons. Those that require a particular habitat, or are intolerant of disturbance or pollution, often can’t survive. This is called biotic homogenization.

Animals and plants that can only live in one small area of land – like unique butterflies or flowers – can go locally extinct if the city’s conditions are unfavorable to them.

A lichen specimen held in the crypt herbarium at the Museum. All living things, including plants and fungi, are represented by the word ‘biodiversity’.

Credit : Natural history museum 

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WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY BIODEGRADABLE?

The word biodegradable, used in conjunction with a substance or object, denotes the capability of being decomposed by bacteria or other living organisms and thereby avoiding pollution. While this adjective describes things that can be broken down into basic substances through natural environmental techniques, the products it is used along with can vary greatly in the time they take to break down. For instance, while a loaf of bread requires only a couple of weeks. a piece of paper might need months and a biodegradable plastic carton could take even years to break down.

Some items are obviously biodegradable. Examples include food scraps and wood that hasn’t been treated with chemicals to resist bugs and rot. Many other items, such as paper, also biodegrade relatively easily. Some products will biodegrade eventually, but it may take years. This includes steel products, which eventually will rust through and disintegrate, and some plastics.

However, conditions are important to encourage biodegradability. Products that will biodegrade in nature or in home compost heaps may not biodegrade in landfills, where there’s not enough bacteria, light, and water to move the process along.

Many organic companies use biodegradable packaging for products or produce organic biodegradable products, but the items may not be as biodegradable as customers think. To make matters more confusing, many items are labeled as “compostable.”

Compostable products are all biodegradable, but they are specifically intended for a composting environment. In the right setting, these products break down even more quickly, usually within 90 days, and they leave behind a nutrient-rich organic material called humus, which creates a healthy soil environment for new plant growth.1

Whether an item is compostable or simply biodegradable, it needs to be placed in an environment that facilitates its breakdown. Compostable products require composting environments. But, even some biodegradable items need to be degraded in a controlled composting environment or facility—and very few of these facilities exist in the United States. These large facilities are designed to keep materials at 140 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 consecutive days.

For example, PLA, a popular biodegradable material for green companies, will only decompose into carbon dioxide and water in a controlled composting environment, not in a backyard composting arrangement, according to standards developed by the Biodegradable Products Institute.

With all of these variables, business owners need to communicate clearly with their customers about what they mean when they say “biodegradable.” Even better are those businesses that take it a step further and educate their customers about how to properly dispose of their products.

Credit : The balance small business 

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