Environmental Challenges Facing the Current Generation What

Environmental Challenges Facing the Current Generation

What are the most challenging environmental issues that will face humanity over the next 50 years? And what are the best ideas for options in the face of these challenges? What are some companies doing to mitigate (reduce, reuse, and recycle resources) the problems on a local level? These and other issues and questions will be approached in this paper.

The Main Environmental Challenges

While there is no one single most serious environmental challenge that all scholars, scientists, researchers, policy makers, journalists and others agree on, any cursory research into future environmental challenges and issues for Planet Earth will turn up the alarming and well-documented consequences of climate change. Of course climate change is not just a future issue but very much a current worry for citizens, scientists and policy makers. Many other critical issues are related to global climate change, including the population explosion.

Population: Indeed, much of the available literature on future environmental challenges reflects that earth's escalating population -- which is expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050 -- will have a great deal to do with the quality of (and sustainability of) the environment in the future. Jim Foley is the director of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment, and he asks the pertinent question relating to population growth: "Can we feed our growing world while still protecting our planet's environment?" (umn.edu). His point is that people in emerging economies -- many of them Third World countries -- "…increasingly want to eat Western, meat-rich diets," and that portends a need to double the world's food supply in the next forty to fifty years (umn.edu).

The need to provide food for a projected 9 billion people is itself a great concern because as Foley reports, thirty percent of the greenhouse gases -- which are known to contribute to the warming of the atmosphere -- are produced from "human agricultural activity" (umn.edu). It is probably not well-known by the general public that greenhouse gases produced by agricultural activity are more than "all our transportation" produces, and more than all the production of electricity (including coal-fired plants), and more than all the manufacturing as well (umn.edu). Given that grim projection of the urgent need for food juxtaposed with the carbon footprints left by the production of food, Foley asserts that a "new kind of agriculture" is needed. He mentions "terraculture" as a solution, along with changes in diet, eating less meat, and being aware of how the food system works (p. 1).

Population: In Author Stephen Emmott's book Ten Billion he points out that 10,000 years ago there were a million people on earth; by 1800 there were one billion humans, and by 1960 the population grew to 3 billion. Today, there are more than 7 billion humans, and Emmott projects that by 2050, there will be "at least 9 billion," a number that matches the prediction of Foley (Emmott, 2013). The author explains that by 2000 it was clear to scientists that the accumulation of CO2 and methane and other greenhouse gases were the result of "…increasing agriculture, land use and the production, processing and transportation of everything we were consuming" -- and once again the production of food from agriculture is seen as a major factor in the warming of the planet (Emmott, p. 2). "We urgently need to do -- and I mean actually do -- something radical to avert a global catastrophe," he writes, adding, "I don't think we will."

Top Ten: A publication called Planet Hearth Herald lists the top ten environmental issues facing the planet: Population; Climate Change; Loss of Biodiversity; the Phosphorus and Nitrogen cycles; Water; Ocean Acidification; Pollution; Ozone Layer Depletion; Over Fishing; and Deforestation. Among those ten, at least three are directly caused by climate change.

Climate Change: There are a few naysayers -- politicians and radio personalities -- who continue to insist that: a) climate change is a naturally occurring event and there is no evidence that it is dangerous to the future of the planet; and b) humans are not responsible for the warming up of the atmosphere. But the evidence based on science is indisputable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been detailing specific changes in the climate for over twenty years. "Multiple lines of evidence" shows that "the climate is changing across our planet, largely as a result of human activities" (IPCC, 2013).

The most "compelling evidence of climate change," the IPCC explains, is that the scientific observations offer "unequivocal" evidence derived from the atmosphere, land, oceans and cryosphere" (IPCC, 2013). Sea levels are rising and global temperature records show increases in atmospheric temperatures.

In 1992, there were 170 nations that agreed to limit fossil fuel emissions at the Framework Convention on Climate Change, but according to an article in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One, the "…stark reality is that global emissions have accelerated," and what makes that more frightening is that efforts are underway to continue to "massively expand fossil fuel extraction" (Hansen, et al., 2013). The fact that burning fossil fuel is known to be a big contributor to climate change appears to be lost on the energy industry, as there currently are projects nationwide to squeeze oil from tar sands and tar shale, "hydro=-fracking to expand extraction of natural gas," along with mining coal by scraping off the tops of mountains in Kentucky and West Virginia (Hansen, 1).

In fact the growth rate of fossil fuel emissions has increased from 1.5% per year (in the years 1980 -- 2000) to 3% per year in the years 2000 to 2012 (Hansen, 1). Because the earth is "substantially out of energy balance," Hansen continues, "…long-term warming will continue" (2). As of now, the Arctic sea ice levels have "plummeted by more than a third in the past few decades," and mountain glaciers are "receding rapidly all around the world" (Hansen, 4). When glaciers melt away, it reduces freshwater that is seasonably available for major rivers in the world; droughts and wildfires have also resulted from the overheated planet, Hansen continues.