Show source. Query: Search. Translations English. Definition Environmental degradation is a process through which the natural environment is compromised in some way, reducing biological diversity and the general health of the environment.
This leads to increased risk from disasters, and in turn, natural hazards can further degrade the environment. The reduction of the capacity of the environment to meet social and ecological objectives and needs is described as environmental degradation. This degradation and the associated decline of ecosystems and their invaluable services the benefits we obtain are driving disaster risk.
Changes to the environment can influence the frequency and intensity of hazards, as well as our exposure and vulnerability to these hazards. For instance, deforestation of slopes often leads to an increase in landslide hazard and removal of mangroves can increase the damage caused by storm surges.
See a related story: 'Narco-deforestation' may boost disaster risks in Central America. Land degradation is both a cause and effect of rural poverty and vulnerability. Poor rural households in developing countries suffer disproportionately from land degradation, the direct effects of which include losses in soil organic content, nutrients and water storage and regulation, which in turn lead to a loss of productive capacity and wildlife habitat.
In the low input-low output agricultural systems common to poor rural areas, such as sub-Saharan Africa, nutrient inputs to the soil are almost always less than the outputs.
Land degradation, therefore, particularly drives drought risk, but can also drive climate change , leading to increases in average mean temperatures and decreases in mean precipitation at the local level. Most ecosystems have been intentionally or unintentionally modified to increase the supply of certain services.
However, an increase in the supply of services can frequently lead to declines in other services, because ecosystems produce many services simultaneously. For example, increased food production changes the absorption capacity of the land and can lead to reduced flood protection. Population growth and economic development area seen as ubiquitous drivers of environmental change through energy, transport, urbanisation, and globalisation.
While debate persists on the relative importance of the various socioeconomic causes of environmental degradation, which are essentially interdependent and complex weakness of institutions, poverty, overpopulation, capitalism , economic growth , trafficking and illegal exploitation, etc. The LPI measures biodiversity by collecting data on the abundance of various species and the way they have evolved over time 14, populations of 3, species of vertebrae: mammals, fish, amphibians, and reptiles across the whole globe.
Every year humanity produces more than 4 billion , nearly half of it generated in urban areas. By , this figure could have. The Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth issued a warning about the unlimited exploitation of limited resources and the question of waste back in Today , management of the waste problem extends into the domestic space and supports an industry worth USD billion annually , while 20 million people work in the informal recycling sector.
As Baptiste Monsaingeon argues, waste often remains invisible to those who produce it: by isolating the problem of waste and focusing on its management and disposal, we are obscuring the political, economic and social choices that lead to its production in the first place. This indicator measures the impact of human activities by assessing the total biologically productive area necessary for different types of lifestyle, in order to produce the resources they consume and absorb the waste they generate.
The values obtained measured in global hectares per capita vary substantially from the more predatory to the less predatory societies between 5 and 10 gha for North America and some European countries, to less than 1 gha for India, Indonesia and part of Africa. This indicator is also used more broadly to measure the impacts of actions by an individual or institution private companies, international organizations, specific projects, etc. The date when this era began is still a matter of debate, varying between the Industrial Revolution in the early s and the atomic era starting from the s.
Hardin imagines a fictional pasture that is freely accessible. This parable is a key reference for international environmental policy. The global governance system aims to articulate collective interests, to establish rights and duties, to arbitrate disputes and to determine the appropriate regulatory mechanisms for the issues and actors in question.
Governance takes various forms: global multilateral governance, club-based governance restricted to members, e. This notion comes from two philosophical traditions: the ancient concept of community, taken over by the Catholic Church, and the liberal and utilitarian idea of individual responsibility.
It enables the general interest of societies, such as the protection of common goods, to be defined. Some goods are therefore beyond the limits state jurisdiction the high seas, space or beyond sovereign claims Antarctica. At the international level, it refers to the set of processes, mechanisms and institutions that act to correct imbalances that might threaten the global order and to ensure that actors behave predictably, thereby ensuring stability.
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