Impact of Human Activities on Environment

The beautiful part of nature is in its diversity, stability and dependency of its creations and resources on one another. But the greedy interfere of humans have endangered all the diveresed creations and have imbalanced the creative natural mechanism to a larger extent. Let no one claim of insufficient or inadequate natural resources. It is rather the matter of inefficient and exploiting use of available environmental resources by humans. The greed of wealth and wish for attaining an unholy power has forced all of us to loot and to pollute all those natural resources with out which one can’t even think of existence of this beautiful universe.
The various human activities have resulted in a change and impact in the natural biodiversity on planet earth. The human modifications in environment have resulted in ecological imbalance and is expected to result in a major environmental crisis in future. The various anthropogenic activities are degrading environment day by day and are effecting the quality of natural environment. Human activities had been effecting environment from thousands of years. Humans have been endangering and altering natural environment through agriculture, irrigation, population explosion, deforestation, constructions, urbanization, pollution and technology. Indeed the human beings are fundamental part of environment. The humans contribute to the growth and development of environment by various activities and some of these activities have positive effect on environment while some of the activities negatively effect the environment and destroy it over the time. The common environmental issues which have resulted due to the hazardous human activities include deforestation, pollution, global warming, habitat loss, biodiversity loss, ozone layer depletion etc. Conventionally any interfere in the nature is accompanied with a bundle of adverse impacts. The human overpopulation has led to an unprecedented competition and rise in conflicts among the human beings and has produced a stress upon the limited natural resources. With the increase in population there has been a greater demand for food, water, energy, healthcare, transportation and much more. This grown population has pushed the people to convert tree fed land into agricultural land and use pesticides and chemicals which had badly effected the marine lives. Cutting down of trees as deforestation for the purpose of timber and conversion of forest land for agricultural, commercial and residential use has endangered a lot wildlife throughout the world. The deforestation has led to habitat loss in the natural ecosystem. The world has lost 420 million hectares, approximately 10.34% of its total forest area in the last 30 years according to the 2022 edition of The State of the World’s Forest (SOFO) released on May 2, 2022. As per a report by the International Bank for reconstruction and development (IBRD) pollution is the largest environmental cause of diseases and premature death. The pollution causes more than 9 million premature deaths, the majority of them due to air pollution. That’s several times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. The piles of plastic which we are throwing in water bodies has created a mess in our surroundings. As per report Global Plastic Outlook plastic pollution is growing relentlessly as only 9% of plastic waste is recycled while 22% is mismanaged. Today we produce about 400 million tonnes of plastic waste every year. In 2019, 132 governments of the world met to create an international United Nations-backed analysis of the world ecosystem. This analysis called the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found that approximately 1 million species are at risk of extinction due to human activity.
Over the past certain decades due to the remarkable rise in concentration of carbon dioxide due to the burning of fossils and other green house gases in the atmosphere there has been a gradual increase in average global temperature called global warming. A change that is believed to be permanently impact the normal climatic conditions. From the past 100 years average temperature has risen from 0.4C to 0.8C. The environmental scientists and research has predicted that average global temperature can increase from 1.4C to 5.8C by the year 2100. This climate change is major challenge of the time. Rise in sea levels with the result in flooding of low lying areas, droughts and melting of ice caps are all affilated impacts of climate variation and the global warming. Indeed there has been a long list of environmental protocols and summits conducted at the international level in regard to environmental issues. The Paris agreement in recent times had central aim to strengthen the global response against the threat of climate change by keeping global temperature rise below 2C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5C increase. On earth day 22 April 2016 world leaders of 175 nations signed the agreement at UN headquarter Newyork and record highest number of countries ever signing an international agreement in a single day. Today environmental activists across the globe are concerned about various environmental issues that have victimised the whole globe. There is of course great noise from local environmental caring bodies to international environmental watchdog organisations (like UNEP, WWF, IPCC, Green peace etc). But there is far less impact of these campaigns on ground because we have actually failed in ensuring environmental sustainability or in taking some environmental responsibility from an individual level to the highest level. We are not fairly concerned in preserving the environment that is feeding all of us in its lap. As far as strategy to protect the environment is concerned at the local level we all need to morally care about the environment and all the concerned environmental departments and organisations need to perform on ground. There need to be a mass awareness in media about the value of quality environment and the information about the possibile challenges that could result due to mismanagement and ill treatment of natural environmental resources. Schools and colleges should provide students basic environmental education so that they understand the essence to conserve the natural environment. The countries need to ensure comprehensive environmental quality by reducing the emission of green house gases and various other hazardous chemicals and radio active emissions and check and balance their production and of harmful pollution creating wastes.
(The author is a teacher at Delhi Public School Budgam. The views, opinions, facts, assumptions, presumptions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”.)
[email protected]