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Furthermore, due to the destruction of carbon sinks and the previously stated factors approximately 90% of people are breathing in polluted air, so the issue of air pollution is something that should be considered at the forefront of international concern.
Thus it can be concluded that each of these issues are collectively impacting our environment and its future

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Desertification is the process of land turning arid and unusable. Deforestation can be seen in highly populated areas such as China, Sub-Saharan Africa and India. Some of the effects seen in India are resource depletion and severe dust storms reducing the life quality of many citizens. It occurs as a result of deforestation, climate change and overpopulation. The former event also has a significant link to Loss of biodiversity. This is the extinction, or reduction in numbers of species. Many factors can cause a specie to become endangered or extinct such as loss of habitat as a result of climate change, natural disasters, deforestation and even poaching. For example Polar Bears are now on the endangered list due to climate changes causing their habitat, the polar ice caps to melt. The there are major implications when species become endangered or extinct because it causes disruptions in the food chain and delicately balanced ecosystems.

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Climate change refers to the change in the earth's climate, caused by an enhanced greenhouse effect. The impacts of climate change include increases in average temperatures and sea levels, reduction of snow and ice cover, changes to rainfall and increased heat waves. Effects of climate change have been seen in events such as Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’. There has been a link between climate change to an increase in frequency and scale of natural disasters, “Changes in climate not only affect average temperatures, but also extreme temperatures, increasing the likelihood of weather-related natural disasters.” https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/RisingCost/rising_cost5.php

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Environmental degradation has been linked to a plethora of events which have and are continuing to threaten global environmental security. Examples of such events include overpopulation, air pollution, resource depletion, climate change, natural disasters, loss of biodiversity and desertification. Through analysis, we have formed strong links between the events

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There is a growing disparity in air quality between richer states with the means of improving their air, and the poorer countries that are trapped with toxic air.

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The gap in air quality between rich and poorer countries is increasing steadily, a new report by the World Health Organisation ( WHO) has found

Air quality in more affluent states is slowly getting better, while the air in poorer countries is still getting worse, the study, which was released on Wednesday, said.

"Air pollution threatens us all, but the poorest and most marginalised people bear the brunt of the burden," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

"It is unacceptable that over three billion people - most of them women and children - are still breathing deadly smoke every day from using polluting stoves and fuels in their homes," he added.

In total, 90 percent of people around the world are breathing polluted air, which kills about seven million annually, the WHO estimated.

The health agency conducted its research by comparing the number of small particles in the air.

These particles enter the lungs and cardiovascular system and can cause cancer, respiratory problems and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases.

The vast majority of the deaths each year - more than 90 percent - occurred in low-income countries in Asia and Africa.

According to the data, air quality is the worst in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

A big issue in these regions is the lack of access to clean cooking fuels and technologies in their homes, which leads to air pollution inside of homes.

Other things affecting air quality globally are polluting industries like transportation and intensive agriculture.

But the WHO also noted some positive trends.

It said air quality in richer countries had gradually improved in the past few years, while governments were taking air pollution more seriously, implementing rules and laws increasing the awareness about the issue.

"The good news is that we are seeing more and more governments increasing commitments to monitor and reduce air pollution, as well as more global action from the health sector and other sectors like transport, housing and energy," Tedros said.

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Gap in air quality between rich and poorer countries increases

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The gap in air quality between rich and poorer countries is increasing steadily, a new report by the World Health Organisation ( WHO) has found Air quality in more affluent states is slowly getting better, while the air in poorer countries is still getting worse, the study, which was released on Wednesday, said.

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Unseasonal dust storms in India's north have killed hundreds and afflicted over 100 million people as a result of the rapidly increasing arid land.

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Violent dust and lightning storms have torn through the plains of northern India - including the capital city of New Delhi - and have left more than a trail of death and devastation in their wake.

The weather that has till now claimed 143 lives and maimed hundreds others, many in house collapses, presages a desertifying India that is fast losing some 30,000 hectares of arable land a year, gravely threatening food security for its teeming millions.

This country of 1.28 billion is bracing itself for further such onslaughts that are already being forecast. With lives shattered, families scattered, homes demolished, trees and electricity poles flattened, and water sources contaminated by the swirling dust, authorities are hard pressed to extend relief to men and material quickly enough.
Progressively drier
The unseasonal storms have afflicted over 100 million who have not only lost their family members, but also their cattle and crops.

While farmlands were clogged by precipitating dust or swept away by torrential rains, entire districts plunged into darkness as falling electricity poles snapped power cables. Fires broke out in other places, and lives and livelihood crumpled all around.

Climate change has been increasingly baking much of the Indo-Gangetic, or North Indian, Plains, at 45 degrees Celsius and above in summer, while causing deluges during the four months of monsoon from June.

This land mass is made up of alluvial soil constituted of clay, silt and sand deposited by the mighty Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers that drain the region, yielding half of the country's foodgrains.

The plains get progressively drier toward the west where they culminate in the That - also called the Great Indian Desert - which covers an expanse of 200,000 square kilometres that abuts Pakistan.
Inappropriate agriculture
Thar was a lush terrain millennia ago, until sand and silt particles lifted by strong winds from the alluvial sediments got deposited in the region.

An official study undertaken at the behest of the Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change (MoEF&CC) finds that 96.4 million hectares (mhas) - nearly 30 per cent of India's land area of 328.72 mhas (3.29 million sq km) - are now degraded or face desertification.

"Population pressure has resulted in over exploitation of land for cultivation, grazing, water resources and deforestation, leading to degradation of drylands," says the report, prepared by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and 19 other institutes after analysing satellite images.

Drawing attention to the increased pace of land degradation - broadly defined as loss of agricultural productivity - the study reveals that 26 of India's 29 states have been registering rising desertification over the past decade, with more than 50 per cent of land in five of them under desertification.

A tenth of all desertification has been caused by the loss of soil cover, largely driven by rainfall and surface runoff. Fertile lands are becoming fallow also because of drought, or inappropriate agriculture.
Farm distress
Any impact on agriculture - whether through drought, flooding, or other natural or manmade calamity - can be particularly ruinous for India, which, despite its sheen of a rampaging economy, is predominantly agrarian, with 55 per cent of its population dependent on farming as the principal source of work and income security.

As one of the world's largest agrarian economies, India's farm sector contributes 17.32 per cent to the GDP. Over half of India's total land area is arable, but productivity is pitiful owing to fractured and marginal land holdings, imperfect market conditions and lack of backward and forward linkages that stunt farm incomes.

India's social situation is unique, leagues apart from the commercial and automated farm factories of the developed world, with 60 per cent of India's 253 million farmers holding an average 0.4 hectare each and another 20 per cent, 1.4 hectare each.

There are 116 million farms in the country and cropped area is shrinking instead of expanding, desertification being a major cause. Since 1995-96, the average size land-holding has decreased from 1.4 hectares to 1.15 hectares, translating into a loss of 30,000 hectares of cultivable land each year. The population in this period has swelled by over 300 million.

Farm distress is consequently glaring, with an estimated 200,000 farmers having committed suicide since 1997, an average of upwards of 10,000 every year. This high mortality has resulted primarily from loan defaults, especially in times of crop failure, decreasing profitability, water scarcity, depleting soil health, land fragmentation, inappropriate seeds and inadequate credit.
Political neglect
Despite emerging from the disgrace of food deficiency to an era of self-sufficiency, India has around the same proportion - 24 per cent - of undernourished people as it did two decades ago. That is because food sufficiency itself is a myth, with much of India's poor unable to afford a proper meal.

Over 260 million men, women and children are undernourished, subsisting on 260 kilocalories per day, when the minimum dietary energy requirement is for 1,770 and the global average, 2,240.

Forty-three per cent of children below five in India suffer from malnutrition, in contrast to seven per cent for China. Malnutrition besides accounts for nearly half the child deaths in India, the prevalence of underweight children almost twice that in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute ranked India 100th among 119 countries in its Global Hunger Index 2017. The country's position was poorer even than its impoverished neighbours like Nepal (72), Myanmar (77), Bangladesh (88) and Sri Lanka (84). China ranked 29, and even North Korea, at 93, and Iraq, at 78, fared better.

Agriculture is clearly one sector to have fared poorly owing to political neglect, despite farmers constituting an enormous nationwide vote-bank. Though its role remains critical in the Indian context, agriculture has seen its share in GDP decline from 29.76 to 17.32 per cent over the past 20 years.
Foreign producers
Evidently, the government is anxious to expand the weightage of the services industry - the "new economy" - in the overall GDP. Services enjoys a 54 per cent share in the GDP and clocked 8.3 per cent growth in 2017-18, while agriculture grew at a rate of 2.1 per cent. Moreover, while India's exports of farm products were worth $30 billion that year, software exports recorded revenues of $167 billion.

As desertification progresses and smothers the croplands, India will need to increasingly import its food requirements.

The long term impact of this on commodity markets worldwide can well be significant. In January 2016, India made its first purchases of corn in 16 years and it has also been increasing purchases of other products, such as lentils and oilmeals, as production falls short.

In the two years between 2014-15 and 2016-17, India's import bill for cereals, including wheat, rice and maize, surged a staggering 6,623 per cent, and its agrarian imports in 2015-16 alone cost the country $21 billion.

While these imports are resorted to for checking domestic food inflation, it aggravates the condition of the Indian farmers who see them as benefiting foreign producers at the cost of the locals.
Combating desertification
India is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Combating Desertification (UNCCD) that was adopted in 1994 - two years after the Rio Earth Summit - to become a legally binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management.

India has since prepared its National Action Programme on this issue and has committed to combat desertification and land degradation and achieve land degradation neutral status by 2030. MoEF&CC is the nodal Ministry for executing this.

Alarmingly, it does not have a specific policy or legislative framework for combating desertification as such, and has no coherent plan to reverse this process or its impact.
This Author
Sarosh Bana is executive editor of Business India.

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Dust storms killing hundreds are the latest tragedy in 'desertifying' India

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Violent dust and lightning storms have torn through the plains of northern India - including the capital city of New Delhi - and have left more than a trail of death and devastation in their wake.

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On environmental degradation.

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Due to polar ice caps melting, polar bears are starting to starve. They hunt for their food on top of the ice but with it melting they are unable to do so. Polar bears have a high energy diet and need to consume many calories daily or else they rapidly loose weight and eventually starve to death. Such a large drop in population numbers in such a short period of time has placed Polar bears on the endangered species list.

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Millions have seen the heart-wrenching video of a polar bear clinging to life, its white hair limply covering its thin, bony frame. Shot by Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier of the nonprofit group Sea Legacy, and published on National Geographic in early December, the video ignited a firestorm of debate about what scientists know, and don't know, about the impacts of global warming on polar bears. Without examining the bear in the video-thought to have died-it's impossible to know for sure what ailed that individual, but now scientists have published new findings that shed more light on the risk to the species overall.

Because of melting sea ice, it is likely that more polar bears will soon starve, warns a new study that discovered the large carnivores need to eat 60 percent more than anyone had realized. Turns out they are high-energy beasts, burning through 12,325 calories a day-despite sitting around most of the time, according to a unique metabolic analysis of wild bears published Thursday in .

"Our study reveals polar bears' utter dependence on seals," said lead author Anthony Pagano, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Polar bears rely almost exclusively on a calorie-loaded diet of seals. To minimize their energy consumption the bears still-hunt, waiting for hours by seals' cone-shaped breathing holes in the sea ice. When a seal surfaces to breathe the bear stands on its hind legs and smacks it on the head with both of its front paws to stun it. Then the bear bites it on the neck and drags it onto the ice.

"They're far more successful doing this than any other method of hunting," Pagano said. That's why the melting of the Arctic sea ice threatens polar bear survival.

Disappearing Ice Makes for Hungrier Bears

Climate change is heating up the Arctic faster than anywhere else, and sea ice is shrinking 14 percent per decade. Even today, in the middle of the bitter cold Arctic winter, satellites show there is about 770,000 square miles less sea ice than the 1981 to 2010 median (That's an area larger than Alaska and California combined). In the late spring, the ice is breaking up sooner and forming later in the fall, forcing bears to burn huge amounts of energy walking or swimming long distances to get to any remaining ice. Or they stay on land longer, spending the summer and, increasingly, the fall fasting, living off their fat from the seals they caught in the spring.

Pagano's study involved capturing nine female bears in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska last April, when there are normally lots of seals around. The bears were fitted with GPS collars that had cameras to record point-of-view videos of each. Blood and urine samples were also taken. Eight to 11 days later they were all re-captured. One bear had moved 155 miles away by that time. Blood and urine samples were taken again and the video and other data were downloaded.

The data showed the bears were active about 35 percent of the time and resting for the remainder, yet they burned through 12,325 calories a day, much of it from their body reserves. That's about 60 percent more than previous studies had estimated. The videos revealed that four of the females weren't able to catch a single seal. Measurements showed those animals lost 10 percent or more of their body mass.

One bear lost close to 44 pounds, including her lean muscle, in 10 days. This bear even leapt into the sea in a failed attempt to catch a seal swimming by. "She might have been desperate," Pagano speculated.

"It's a really strong study," said Steven Amstrup, chief scientist for Polar Bears International, a conservation-focused organization, who was not involved with the work. "It shows that polar bears are more like the big cats-lions and tigers- predatory carnivores with high energy metabolisms," Amstrup said.

As solitary hunters, the bears are more like tigers, except twice as big, some tipping scales at 1,100 pounds. And yet they are uniquely vulnerable in their almost total reliance on one prey species.

Bigger Impact Than Previously Thought?

If these results hold up, then it shows that the loss of sea ice may have a bigger impact on the bears than previously thought, said Amstrup, a former USGS polar bear expert. Amstrup's own 2010 study projected that continued decline in sea ice would reduce the global population of bears by two thirds, to less than 10,000 by 2050.

Best estimates say there are 20,000 to 30,000 polar bears in 19 different groups or populations scattered across the top of the U.S., Canada, Greenland, Norway, and Russia. Four of these populations are considered to be declining. Bears in the Beaufort Sea region are among the best studied and their numbers have fallen 40 percent in the last ten years. Five populations are thought to be stable and there's not enough known about the others to judge. ( See how scientists are trying to track polar bears across vast areas of Russia.)

Polar bears are considered endangered in the U.S. and are listed as "vulnerable" by the IUCN, because their sea ice habitat is under threat from climate change.

Not Built for Walking

Although it's just a 10-day snapshot, the study confirms that polar bears aren't made for walking, said Andrew Derocher, Canada's leading polar bear expert and a professor at the University of Alberta. They're not efficient walkers, but thanks to their high-energy diet of seals they can roam an area as large as 95,000 square miles, Derocher said in an interview.

Bears can lose weight fast but also gain it back quickly if they can catch seals. "I've seen a 500-kilogram [1,100-pound] male consume 100 kilograms [200 pounds] of seal in one meal," he said.

The farther the bears have to travel to get on the ice to hunt the more weight they lose. Eventually they start losing muscle, hurting their chances of hunting success, which can lead to a downward spiral. Bears are also doing a lot more swimming as the sea ice declines, said Derocher.

Although capable of swimming long distances, polar bears burn far more energy doing so than walking, a recent study published in Polar Biology found.

"As the sea ice melts earlier and earlier, polar bears are forced to swim more and more, to reach seal populations," said author Blaine Griffen, a biologist at BYU in a release. One female bear Griffen studied swam 426 miles over nine days. She lost 22 percent of her body weight and, worse, lost the nursing cub that had started the journey with her.

More swimming could lead to smaller bears, reduced reproduction rates, and even increased risk of death-something already being seen in western Hudson Bay and around the southern Beaufort Sea, Griffen said.

There's no doubt that as the sea ice declines more and more bears are going to starve to death, said Amstrup. "I don't know if that poor bear in that video was starving. I do know that the only solution for the long-term survival of the polar bear is to address climate change."

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Polar Bears Really Are Starving Because of Global Warming, Study Shows

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Millions have seen the heart-wrenching video of a polar bear clinging to life, its white hair limply covering its thin, bony frame. Shot by Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier of the nonprofit group Sea Legacy, and published on National Geographic in early December, the video ignited a firestorm of debate about what scientists know, and don't know, about the impacts of global warming on polar bears.

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Cape Town is on the verge of becoming the first major city to run out of water. ‘Day Zero’ has been predicted for July 9th, with residents currently restricted to less than 50 litres of water a day.

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Cape Town is in the grip of a drought widely regarded as the worst in recorded history - one that could see it become the first city in the world to run out of water.

The city is edging closer to a day - known locally as "Day Zero" - when supplies are so low authorities will have to cut off water to three quarters of the population.

Far from being a hypothetical scenario, Day Zero has a set date. It is currently expected on 9 July.

The perfect storm of conditions that led to this drought, specifically three consecutive years of extremely low rainfall, would generally be expected no more than once in a millennium.

Predicting such "freak" events is tricky for scientists, but one thing is clear: climate change appears to have played a significant role in the Cape's current misfortune, and it is set to make such events far more likely in the years to come.

Scientists have long suspected climate change has a hand in natural disasters such as droughts, flooding and hurricanes.

However, until relatively recently they have lacked sufficient data to support these suspicions.

While the link between a warming world and increased incidence of droughts may seem obvious, even here the complexity of the natural systems involved mean it can be difficult to draw direct links.

But in the Cape, where a cycle of wet and dry years is the natural course of things, there is evidence that global warming has caused the usual dry spell to intensify significantly.

"The effects of global warming are now interwoven with this natural variability," says Professor Mark New, a climate researcher at the University of Cape Town.

Climate change contributes to drought both by changing rain levels and temperature.

"Droughts are a natural phenomenon in the Western Cape and the effect of climate changes is that it magnifies all weather events - both drought and flooding - and makes them less easy to predict," says Dr Piotr Wolski, a hydrologist in the climate system analysis group at the University of Cape Town.

While it is difficult to draw firm conclusions while the disaster is still ongoing, "tentative preliminary analysis" by Professor New suggests that the once-in-a-millennium dry spell Cape Town is currently experiencing was made five times more likely by global warming.

What this means is that the 1C rise in average temperature over the past century in the region has increased the likelihood of such an event fivefold, compared to a scenario in which this warming had not taken place.

Across southern Africa more broadly, a 2016 analysis found that a slight shift towards lower rainfall in the region resulting from climate change is "likely".

And while Cape Town may be the first city to run out of water due to climate change, experts predict it will not be the last.

Major hubs, including Mexico City, Sao Paulo and even London, could all be at risk of running out of water if rainfall is too low and sufficient preparatory measures are not taken.

According to the UN, climate change, population growth and consumption will likely result in two-thirds of the entire global population facing a lack of sufficient water resources by 2025.

As the Western Cape is expected to warm by around 0.25C over the next decade, the likelihood of drought there is expected to increase sevenfold.

Global warming will inevitably lead to extreme conditions becoming the new normal, and the scientists stress the importance of adaptation to this new reality.

"One positive outcome of the drought is that the general population has a better understanding of the linkages between climate and day-to-day life as well as an improved saving mentality and awareness of the value of water," says Dr Wolski.

As the water crisis has increased in severity over the past two years, Cape Town has introduced ever more restrictive measures to bring down water use. Demand has been reduced from 1,200 million litres a day in 2015 to less than 600 million litres today.

Current restrictions in Cape Town require residents to use less than 50 litres of water each per day - compared to more than 300 litres used every day by the average American.

Meanwhile, work now must begin on long-term measures such as desalination plants that can keep the city adequately supplied with water during future droughts.

"On the supply side, the drought has accelerated research and investment into alternative water sources that will assist in making the system more resilient in the medium to long term," says Dr Wolski.

Though the predictions made by climate change attribution scientists seem bleak, they do serve to transform the conversation about natural disasters.

Soenke Kreft, leader of Munich Climate Insurance Initiative at the United Nations University, has described attribution science as an important area of research with "potential to transform public narratives into more specific prevention measures of risks".

While mitigation strategies can work as a sticking plaster for problems like droughts, they do not address the root of the problem - namely greenhouse gas emissions.

The worst predictions made about future droughts, in which the Mediterranean, south-west US and southern Africa begin to dry up by the end of the century, are all based on scenarios where carbon dioxide emissions do not fall.

By making the mental link between emissions and real-world outcomes such as droughts, scientists hope that both the public and policymakers can be convinced to take action.

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Cape Town is almost at the feared 'Day Zero'

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Cape Town is in the grip of a drought widely regarded as the worst in recorded history - one that could see it become the first city in the world to run out of water.

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In Bosaso, Somalia – at least 15 people lose their lives as a result of heavy rains caused by cyclone Sagar. The extent of the damage is yet to be confirmed due to unsuccessful communications and blocked roads.

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BOSASO, SOMALIA (REUTERS) - At least 15 people have died in Somaliland after heavy rains caused by tropical cyclone Sagar, which landed in the Horn of Africa over the weekend.

Situated at the northern tip of east Africa on the Gulf of Aden, Somaliland broke away from Somalia in 1991.

"In the last 24 hours, heavy stormy rains killed 15 people in the districts of Lughaya and Baki," Mr Abdirahman Ahmed Ali, the governor of the Awdal area, told reporters on Sunday (May 20).

"The Somaliland government has started giving emergency help to the victims."

Meanwhile, in Puntland, a semi-autonomous northeastern region of Somalia, storms caused by the cyclone took away two men and their car from a valley in the city of Bosaso, Mr Yusuf Mohamed Waeys, the governor of Bari in Puntland, told Reuters on Sunday.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said thousands of people have been affected by the flooding, displacement and the destruction of infrastructure in Sagar's wake.

"The cyclone has worsened the humanitarian situation in the two states and disputed regions, which have experienced protracted drought dating back to 2015, leaving them particularly prone to flash flooding in the direct aftermath of massive downpours," it said in a statement.

Puntland and Somaliland have been engaged in conflict over the disputed Sool region for more than 10 years.

People who live there are divided over which side to back. Last week, dozens of people were killed in clashes between troops from the two sides.

"Due to the dispute over the regions of Sool and Sanaag and lack of access to some affected areas after the destruction of roads, the situation of affected populations and impediments caused by blocked roads and failed communications, the extent of the damage is yet to be fully confirmed," the UN said.

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Tropical cyclone kills at least 15 people in Somaliland

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BOSASO, SOMALIA (REUTERS) - At least 15 people have died in Somaliland after heavy rains caused by tropical cyclone Sagar, which landed in the Horn of Africa over the weekend. Situated at the northern tip of east Africa on the Gulf of Aden, Somaliland broke away from Somalia in 1991.