Archive for Mei 2024
Water Pollution
What is Water Pollution?
What is water pollution? Water pollution occurs when harmful substances—often chemicals or microorganisms—contaminate a stream, river, lake, ocean, aquifer, or other body of water, degrading water quality and rendering it toxic to humans or the environment.
What causes Water Pollution?
Water is uniquely vulnerable to pollution. Known as a “universal solvent,” water is able to dissolve more substances than any other liquid on earth. It’s the reason we have Kool-Aid and brilliant blue waterfalls. It’s also why water is so easily polluted. Toxic substances from farms, towns, and factories readily dissolve into and mix with it, causing water pollution.
What effects of Water Pollution?
The effect of water pollution depends upon the type of pollutants and their concentration. Also, the location of water bodies is an important factor to determine the levels of pollution.
- Water bodies in the vicinity of urban areas are extremely polluted. This is the result of dumping garbage and toxic chemicals by industrial and commercial establishments.
- Water pollution drastically affects aquatic life. It affects their metabolism, and behaviour, and causes illness and eventual death. Dioxin is a chemical that causes a lot of problems from reproduction to uncontrolled cell growth or cancer. This chemical is bioaccumulated in fish, chicken and meat. Chemicals such as this travel up the food chain before entering the human body.
- The effect of water pollution can have a huge impact on the food chain. It disrupts the food chain. Cadmium and lead are some toxic substances, these pollutants upon entering the food chain through animals (fish when consumed by animals, humans) can continue to disrupt at higher levels.
- Don't drain certain products down your sink or toilet. When cleaning chemicals, medicines, or oils reach a water supply, they can be difficult to remove.
- Use less plastic.
- Conserve water.
- Prevent runoff.
- Cut down on pesticides and herbicides.
- Pick up pet waste.
Deforestation
As the entire world seeks to slow the pace of climate change, trees inevitably hold a significant part of the answer. Yet the mass destruction of trees continues, sacrificing the long-term benefits of standing trees for short-term gain. We need trees for various reasons, not least of which is that they absorb not only the carbon dioxide that we exhale but also the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities emit.
According to one estimate, tropical tree cover alone can provide 23 percent of the climate mitigation needed over the next decade to meet goals set in the Paris Agreement in 2015. Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate.
Between 1990 and 2016, the world lost 1.3 million square kilometers of forest, according to the World Bank. Since humans started cutting down forests, 46 percent of trees have been felled, according to a 2015 study in the journal Nature. About 17 percent of the Amazonian rainforest has been destroyed over the past 50 years, and losses recently have been on the rise.
With the current rate of population explosion, the world population could be expected to increase from 7.6 billion to about 10 billion in the next 30 to 35 years. The growing demand for food can be expected to rise by 50% in the given period, and it is a matter of grave concern.
Rational utilization and proper management of forest resources are the most viable ways to prevent mass destruction of forests and large-scale species extinction. It is necessary to find the links between the growing demands and meeting the needs in a sustainable manner.
source: https://forestecocertification.com/what-is-deforestation/