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Eutrophication

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Eutrophication poses a problem not only to ecosystems , but to humans as well. Reducing eutrophication should be a key concern when considering future policy, and a sustainable solution for...

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Ecology Project - Biological Magnification, Deforestation, Eutrophication and Sustainability

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Biological Magnification, Deforestation, Eutrophication and Sustainability By: David Kohn, Saumya Ranjan, Nicholas Sautter, and Gabriella Porat

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Pg 765

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Forests cover 31% of the land area on our planet. They help people thrive and survive by, for example, purifying water and air and providing people with jobs; some 13.2 million people across the world have a job in the forest sector and another 41 million have a job that is related to the sector. Many animals also rely on forests. Eighty percent of the world's land-based species, such as elephants and rhinos, live in forests. Forests also play a critical role in mitigating climate change because they act as a carbon sink-soaking up carbon dioxide that would otherwise be free in the atmosphere and contribute to ongoing changes in climate patterns.

But forests around the world are under threat, jeopardizing these benefits. The threats manifest themselves in the form of deforestation and forest degradation. The main cause of deforestation is agriculture (poorly planned infrastructure is emerging as a big threat too) and the main cause of forest degradation is illegal logging. We're losing 18.7 million acres of forests annually, equivalent to 27 soccer fields every minute.

Deforestation is a particular concern in tropical rain forests because these forests are home to much of the world's biodiversity. For example, in the Amazon around 17% of the forest has been lost in the last 50 years, mostly due to forest conversion for cattle ranching. Deforestation in this region is particularly rampant near more populated areas, roads and rivers, but even remote areas have been encroached upon when valuable mahogany, gold, and oil are discovered.

WWF has been working to protect forests for more than 50 years. WWF works with governments, companies, communities and other stakeholders to promote certification for responsible forest management practices, combat illegal logging, reform trade policies, protect forested areas, and more.

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Deforestation and Forest Degradation | Threats | WWF

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Forests cover 31% of the land area on our planet. They help people thrive and survive by, for example, purifying water and air and providing people with jobs; some 13.2 million people across the world have a job in the forest sector and another 41 million have a job that is related to the sector.

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David, read over this presentation. I found it very helpful (Used 2 photos from this presentation)

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Eutrophication and how it relates to Sustainability

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Eutrophication and how it relates to Sustainability

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Eutrophication - GES - Marine - Environment - European Commission

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One of the goals of the European Commission's Marine Directive is to achieve Good Environmental Status of eutrophication in EU marine waters.

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Deforestation and how it relates to Sustainability

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Deforestation and how it relates to Sustainability

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The causes of deforestation and degradation vary from region to region. In the tropics, agribusiness clears forests to make space for things like cattle ranching, palm oil and soy plantations for animal feed. Demand for wood products can threaten forests around the world, whether it is for throw-away paper products or hardwood flooring.

In too many parts of the world, ineffective or corrupt governments make things worse by opening the door to illegal logging and other crimes.

Solving Deforestation

Deforestation and degradation are a complex problems. While there are no silver bullet solutions, these approaches can make a big difference to save our forests.

Collaboration

The forestry industry in Canada's boreal forest not only provides local and international markets with valuable forest products, but also employs thousands of people in local communities across the country. Some paper producers take seriously their responsibility to carefully and sustainably manage, harvest in, and source from these forests, while also supporting local economies.

Greenpeace works in collaboration every day with First Nations, governments, other forest products companies, and unions to foster a responsible forest products industry and healthy local communities. Numerous global companies and household brands have embraced Greenpeace's critiques and ultimately adopted more sustainable practices. We've secured strong and lasting collaborations with countless companies who have traveled the path from conflict to solutions.

So there's no reason why Canada's largest forestry company, Resolute Forest Products , can't do the same. Instead, Resolute is trying to silence criticism by meritlessly suing Greenpeace and other forest defenders like Stand.earth.

The Power of the Marketplace

If corporations have the power to destroy the world's forests, they also have the ability to help save them.

Companies can make an impact by introducing "zero deforestation" policies that clean up their supply chains. That means holding their suppliers accountable for producing commodities like timber, beef, soy, palm oil and paper in a way that does not fuel deforestation and has a minimal impact on our climate.

Companies should set ambitious targets to maximize the use of recycled wood, pulp, paper and fiber in their products. For the non-recycled products they buy, they should ensure that any virgin fiber used is certified by a third party certification system such as the Forest Stewardship Council .

But these corporations haven't taken action on their own.

That's why we're investigating, exposing and confronting environmental abuse by corporations. Thanks to your actions, major companies are changing their ways and building solutions to protect jobs and our forests.

Standing with Indigenous Peoples

Forests around the world have been home to Indigenous peoples for tens of thousands of years. Evidence shows that when Indigenous peoples' rights to traditional lands and self-determination are respected, forests stay standing. But too often, corporations and governments overlook or intentionally trample the rights of Indigenous peoples .

For example, the are fighting to keep the last wild forests on their traditional land intact, and the Waswanipi Cree of Northern Quebec Munduruku people of the Amazon are battling a proposed mega-dam that threatens rainforests, a river, and their way of life.

Promoting Sustainable Choices

You can make a difference in the fight to save forests by making informed daily choices.

By using less stuff, eating sustainable food , and choosing recycled or certified sustainable wood products, we can all be part of the movement towards zero deforestation.

Using your voice to speak for forests matters, too. When people join together and demand forest conservation, companies and governments have to listen.

Changing the Politics

If we're going to stop deforestation, we need governments to do their part.

That starts with cracking down on corruption and ensuring fair enforcement of forest conservation rules. Corruption fuels illegal logging and unsustainable forest management, which in turn can fuel organized crime or even armed conflict.

Beyond the rule of law, we need world leaders to embrace ambitious domestic and international forest conservation policies based on the latest science.

In the United States, laws like the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the Lacey Act and the Roadless Rule help protect our forests and stop illegal wood products from entering the U.S. marketplace. We also support and use regional rules like the Amazon Soy Moratorium and global treaties like the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to protect forests and the endangered species that rely on forest habitats.

Globally, we need commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation in developing nations, especially those with tropical forests. Forests for Climate is one way to make that happen.

Forests for Climate is an innovative proposal for an international funding mechanism to protect tropical forests. Under this initiative, developing countries with tropical forests can make commitments to protecting their forests in exchange for the opportunity to receive funding for capacity-building efforts and national-level reductions in deforestation emissions. This provides a strong incentive for developing countries to continually improve their forest protection programs.

Take Action for a Deforestation-Free Future

If you're ready to join the movement for a deforestation-free future, here's how you can start:

Make sure that the forest-derived products you buy are made from 100 percent post-consumer content materials.

Make informed food choices . Eating a plant-based diet or reducing your consumption of animal products like meat and dairy can help save forests.

Buy from companies that have a commitment to reducing deforestation through forest-friendly policies.

If you are buying products made from virgin forest fiber, make sure that it bears a seal from a credible forestry certification system, like the Forest Stewardship Council .

Educate your friends, family, and community about how our everyday actions can impact forests around the world.

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The causes of deforestation and degradation vary from region to region. In the tropics, agribusiness clears forests to make space for things like cattle ranching, palm oil and soy plantations for animal feed. Demand for wood products can threaten forests around the world, whether it is for throw-away paper products or hardwood flooring.

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The natural time scale for the aging of a lake from being oligotrophic to eutrophic is of the order of thousands of years. However, a high rate of input of nutrients (from human activities) can increase the rate of aging significantly resulting in eutrophic conditions developing after only a few decades.

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eutrophication

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eutrophication

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eutrophication (how humans affect freshwater systems)

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eutrophication (run off stages)

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(For biomagnification

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(For biomagnification)

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Cadmium can enter the food chain in many indirect and direct processes; one way is the pathway of air. Humans can inhale cadmium directly th...

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Among the many ways that sustainability has been defined, the simplest and most fundamental is: "the ability to sustain" or, put another way, "the capacity to endure."

Today, it is by no means certain our society has the capacity to endure - at least in such a way that the nine billion people expected on Earth by 2050 will all be able to achieve a basic quality of life. The planet's ecosystems are deteriorating and the climate is changing. We are consuming so much, and so quickly, that we are already living far beyond the earth's capacity to support us. And yet nearly a sixth of our fellow humans go to bed hungry each day: both an unnecessary tragedy and a source of social and political unrest. Meanwhile, our globalized world is more interconnected and volatile than ever, making us all more vulnerable.

While sustainability is about the future of our society, for today's industries and businesses, it is also about commercial success. The mandate to transform businesses to respect environmental limits while fulfilling social wants and needs has become an unparalleled platform for innovation on strategy, design, manufacturing and brand, offering massive opportunities to compete and to adapt to a rapidly evolving world.

The change we need

To endure, we as a society must transform our markets - both how we produce and consume, and the very ways in which we define and measure value and progress.

This is a big challenge, and not just for business and economics. It is a call for massive social, political, technological, cultural and behavioral transition. We will need governments to set incentives, targets and rules for a level playing field, civil society actors to hold us to account and to experiment with new ways of delivering social impact, and each of us to take actions in our own lives to reward sustainable business models and to eat, work, travel and play more sustainably.

Business is crucial - but we need new ways of doing it

To achieve this transformation, we need the capacity of business to innovate and to execute, meeting market needs swiftly, effectively and on a global scale. To do this in a way that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" ¹, we will need new ways of doing business. The successful businesses of tomorrow will be those that lead and create value both inside and outside the walls of the company.

This will mean managing for the long-term as well as the short-term, developing strategies that balance competition and cooperation, designing and delivering products and services that meet social and environmental needs, shifting to more resilient business models based on closed-loop, open-source, peer-to-peer or service-based principles (to name a few), incorporating the true costs of environmental and social resources, and seeing transparency and collaboration as sources of competitive advantage.

For these businesses, sustainability means not only eco-efficiency, but also eco-effectiveness. Sustainability is absolutely about marketing and branding - when that means identifying market needs based on long-term prosperity and creating tribes of sustainable consumers. Sustainability needs to be about 'greening'- because businesses and communities depend on healthy, productive ecosystems. Sustainability can also encompass corporate philanthropy - when that philanthropy is strategic.

Above all, we believe that for tomorrow's enduring businesses, sustainability will be about making money by meeting real and fundamental human needs.

What's next

Our vision is a world where all humans have access to healthcare, nutrition, energy, shelter, mobility, education and economic opportunity, where the market system is based on fundamental ethics, inclusive and fair approaches, and transparency, where sustainable brands fulfil their promise to deliver goods and services that satisfy societal and individual demand simultaneously, where energy systems power our economy without increasing global temperatures beyond 2°C, where liberalised trading systems are truly free, fair and sustainable , where natural resources and systems are preserved and renewed, and where clear goals and the promise of value creation help companies to navigate the sustainability journey.

Over twenty years ago we chose the name SustainAbility to reflect both our goal and our conviction that it is possible. We invite you to share in this pursuit.

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Among the many ways that sustainability has been defined, the simplest and most fundamental is: "the ability to sustain" or, put another way, "the capacity to endure." Today, it is by no means certain our society has the capacity to endure - at least in such a way that the nine billion people expected on Earth by 2050 will all be able to achieve a basic quality of life.

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arth is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities have modified almost every part of our planet. In fact, we are having a profound impact on it. Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face. And every one of these problems is accelerating as we continue to grow towards a global population of 10 billion. In fact, I believe we can rightly call the situation we're in right now an emergency - an unprecedented planetary emergency.

We humans emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago. In geological time, that is really incredibly recent. Just 10,000 years ago, there were one million of us. By 1800, just over 200 years ago, there were 1 billion of us. By 1960, 50 years ago, there were 3 billion of us. There are now over 7 billion of us. By 2050, your children, or your children's children, will be living on a planet with at least 9 billion other people. Some time towards the end of this century, there will be at least 10 billion of us. Possibly more.

We got to where we are now through a number of civilisation- and society-shaping "events", most notably the agricultural revolution, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution and - in the West - the public-health revolution. By 1980, there were 4 billion of us on the planet. Just 10 years later, in 1990, there were 5 billion of us. By this point initial signs of the consequences of our growth were starting to show. Not the least of these was on water. Our demand for water - not just the water we drank but the water we needed for food production and to make all the stuff we were consuming - was going through the roof. But something was starting to happen to water.

Back in 1984, journalists reported from Ethiopia about a famine of biblical proportions caused by widespread drought. Unusual drought, and unusual flooding, was increasing everywhere: Australia, Asia, the US, Europe. Water, a vital resource we had thought of as abundant, was now suddenly something that had the potential to be scarce.

By 2000 there were 6 billion of us. It was becoming clear to the world's scientific community that the accumulation of CO ₂, methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - as a result of increasing agriculture, land use and the production, processing and transportation of everything we were consuming - was changing the climate. And that, as a result, we had a serious problem on our hands; 1998 had been the warmest year on record. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998.

We hear the term "climate" every day, so it is worth thinking about what we actually mean by it. Obviously, "climate" is not the same as weather. The climate is one of the Earth's fundamental life support systems, one that determines whether or not we humans are able to live on this planet. It is generated by four components: the atmosphere (the air we breathe); the hydrosphere (the planet's water); the cryosphere (the ice sheets and glaciers); the biosphere (the planet's plants and animals). By now, our activities had started to modify every one of these components.

Our emissions of CO ₂ modify our atmosphere. Our increasing water use had started to modify our hydrosphere. Rising atmospheric and sea-surface temperature had started to modify the cryosphere, most notably in the unexpected shrinking of the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets. Our increasing use of land, for agriculture, cities, roads, mining - as well as all the pollution we were creating - had started to modify our biosphere. Or, to put it another way: we had started to change our climate.

There are now more than 7 billion of us on Earth. As our numbers continue to grow, we continue to increase our need for far more water, far more food, far more land, far more transport and far more energy. As a result, we are accelerating the rate at which we're changing our climate. In fact, our activities are not only completely interconnected with but now also interact with, the complex system we live on: Earth. It is important to understand how all this is connected.

Let's take one important, yet little known, aspect of increasing water use: "hidden water". Hidden water is water used to produce things we consume but typically do not think of as containing water. Such things include chicken, beef, cotton, cars, chocolate and mobile phones. For example: it takes around 3,000 litres of water to produce a burger. In 2012 around five billion burgers were consumed in the UK alone. That's 15 trillion litres of water - on burgers. Just in the UK. Something like 14 billion burgers were consumed in the United States in 2012. That's around 42 trillion litres of water. To produce burgers in the US. In one year. It takes around 9,000 litres of water to produce a chicken. In the UK alone we consumed around one billion chickens in 2012. It takes around 27,000 litres of water to produce one kilogram of chocolate. That's roughly 2,700 litres of water per bar of chocolate. This should surely be something to think about while you're curled up on the sofa eating it in your pyjamas.

But I have bad news about pyjamas. Because I'm afraid your cotton pyjamas take 9,000 litres of water to produce. And it takes 100 litres of water to produce a cup of coffee. And that's before any water has actually been added to your coffee. We probably drank about 20 billion cups of coffee last year in the UK. And - irony of ironies - it takes something like four litres of water to produce a one-litre plastic bottle of water. Last year, in the UK alone, we bought, drank and threw away nine billion plastic water bottles. That is 36 billion litres of water, used completely unnecessarily. Water wasted to produce bottles - for water. And it takes around 72,000 litres of water to produce one of the 'chips' that typically powers your laptop, Sat Nav, phone, iPad and your car. There were over two billion such chips produced in 2012. That is at least 145 trillion litres of water. On semiconductor chips. In short, we're consuming water, like food, at a rate that is completely unsustainable.

Demand for land for food is going to double - at least - by 2050, and triple - at least - by the end of this century. This means that pressure to clear many of the world's remaining tropical rainforests for human use is going to intensify every decade, because this is predominantly the only available land that is left for expanding agriculture at scale. Unless Siberia thaws out before we finish deforestation. By 2050, 1bn hectares of land is likely to be cleared to meet rising food demands from a growing population. This is an area greater than the US. And accompanying this will be three gigatons per year extra CO ₂ emissions.If Siberia does thaw out before we finish our deforestation, it would result in a vast amount of new land being available for agriculture, as well as opening up a very rich source of minerals, metals, oil and gas. In the process this would almost certainly completely change global geopolitics. Siberia thawing would turn Russia into a remarkable economic and political force this century because of its newly uncovered mineral, agricultural and energy resources. It would also inevitably be accompanied by vast stores of methane - currently sealed under the Siberian permafrost tundra - being released, greatly accelerating our climate problem even further.

Amazon rainforest smoulders after being cleared for cattle pasture in Brazil. Photograph: Michael Nichols/Getty Images

Meanwhile, another 3 billion people are going to need somewhere to live. By 2050, 70% of us are going to be living in cities. This century will see the rapid expansion of cities, as well as the emergence of entirely new cities that do not yet exist. It's worth mentioning that of the 19 Brazilian cities that have doubled in population in the past decade, 10 are in the Amazon. All this is going to use yet more land.

We currently have no known means of being able to feed 10 billion of us at our current rate of consumption and with our current agricultural system. Indeed, simply to feed ourselves in the next 40 years, we will need to produce more food than the entire agricultural output of the past 10,000 years combined. Yet food productivity is set to decline, possibly very sharply, over the coming decades due to: climate change; soil degradation and desertification - both of which are increasing rapidly in many parts of the world; and water stress. By the end of this century, large parts of the planet will not have any usable water.

At the same time, the global shipping and airline sectors are projected to continue to expand rapidly every year, transporting more of us, and more of the stuff we want to consume, around the planet year on year. That is going to cause enormous problems for us in terms of more CO ₂ emissions, more black carbon, and more pollution from mining and processing to make all this stuff.

But think about this. In transporting us and our stuff all over the planet, we are also creating a highly efficient network for the global spread of potentially catastrophic diseases. There was a global pandemic just 95 years ago - the Spanish flu pandemic, which is now estimated to have killed up to 100 million people. And that's before one of our more questionable innovations - the budget airline - was invented. The combination of millions of people travelling around the world every day, plus millions more people living in extremely close proximity to pigs and poultry - often in the same room, making a new virus jumping the species barrier more likely - means we are increasing, significantly, the probability of a new global pandemic. So no wonder then that epidemiologists increasingly agree that a new global pandemic is now a matter of "when" not "if".

We are going to have to triple - at least - energy production by the end of this century to meet expected demand. To meet that demand, we will need to build, roughly speaking, something like: 1,800 of the world's largest dams, or 23,000 nuclear power stations, 14m wind turbines, 36bn solar panels, or just keep going with predominantly oil, coal and gas - and build the 36,000 new power stations that means we will need.Our existing oil, coal and gas reserves alone are worth trillions of dollars. Are governments and the world's major oil, coal and gas companies - some of the most influential corporations on Earth - really going to decide to leave the money in the ground, as demand for energy increases relentlessly? I doubt it.

Meanwhile the emerging climate problem is on an entirely different scale. The problem is that we may well be heading towards a number of critical "tipping points" in the global climate system. There is a politically agreed global target - driven by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - to limit the global average temperature rise to 2C. The rationale for this target is that a rise above 2C carries a significant risk of catastrophic climate change that would almost certainly lead to irreversible planetary "tipping points", caused by events such as the melting of the Greenland ice shelf, the release of frozen methane deposits from Arctic tundra, or dieback of the Amazon. In fact, the first two are happening now - at below the 2C threshold.

As for the third, we're not waiting for climate change to do this: we're doing it right now through deforestation. And recent research shows that we look certain to be heading for a larger rise in global average temperatures than 2C - a far larger rise. It is now very likely that we are looking at a future global average rise of 4C - and we can't rule out a rise of 6C. This will be absolutely catastrophic. It will lead to runaway climate change, capable of tipping the planet into an entirely different state, rapidly. Earth will become a hellhole. In the decades along the way, we will witness unprecedented extremes in weather, fires, floods, heatwaves, loss of crops and forests, water stress and catastrophic sea-level rises. Large parts of Africa will become permanent disaster areas. The Amazon could be turned into savannah or even desert. And the entire agricultural system will be faced with an unprecedented threat.

More "fortunate" countries, such as the UK, the US and most of Europe, may well look like something approaching militarised countries, with heavily defended border controls designed to prevent millions of people from entering, people who are on the move because their own country is no longer habitable, or has insufficient water or food, or is experiencing conflict over increasingly scarce resources. These people will be "climate migrants". The term "climate migrants" is one we will increasingly have to get used to. Indeed, anyone who thinks that the emerging global state of affairs does not have great potential for civil and international conflict is deluding themselves. It is no coincidence that almost every scientific conference that I go to about climate change now has a new type of attendee: the military.

Every which way you look at it, a planet of 10 billion looks like a nightmare. What, then, are our options?

The only solution left to us is to change our behaviour, radically and globally, on every level. In short, we urgently need to consume less. A lot less. Radically less. And we need to conserve more. A lot more. To accomplish such a radical change in behaviour would also need radical government action. But as far as this kind of change is concerned, politicians are currently part of the problem, not part of the solution, because the decisions that need to be taken to implement significant behaviour change inevitably make politicians very unpopular - as they are all too aware.

So what politicians have opted for instead is failed diplomacy. For example: The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, whose job it has been for 20 years to ensure the stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere: Failed. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification, whose job it's been for 20 years to stop land degrading and becoming desert: Failed. The Convention on Biological Diversity, whose job it's been for 20 years to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss: Failed. Those are only three examples of failed global initiatives. The list is a depressingly long one. And the way governments justify this level of inaction is by exploiting public opinion and scientific uncertainty. It used to be a case of, "We need to wait for science to prove climate change is happening". This is now beyond doubt. So now it's, "We need to wait for scientists to be able to tell us what the impact will be and the costs". And, "We need to wait for public opinion to get behind action". But climate models will never be free from uncertainties. And as for public opinion, politicians feel remarkably free to ignore it when it suits them - wars, bankers' bonuses and healthcare reforms, to give just three examples.

What politicians and governments say about their commitment to tackling climate change is completely different from what they are doing about it.

What about business? In 2008 a group of highly respected economists and scientists led by Pavan Sukhdev, then a senior Deutsche Bank economist, conducted an authoritative economic analysis of the value of biodiversity. Their conclusion? The cost of the business activities of the world's 3,000 largest corporations in loss or damage to nature and the environment now stands at $2.2tn per year. And rising. These costs will have to be paid for in the future. By your children and your grandchildren. To quote Sukhdev: "The rules of business urgently need to be changed, so corporations compete on the basis of innovation, resource conservation and satisfaction of multiple stakeholder demands, rather than on the basis of who is most effective in influencing government regulation, avoiding taxes and obtaining subsidies for harmful activities to maximise the return for shareholders." Do I think that will happen? No. What about us?

I confess I used to find it amusing, but I am now sick of reading in the weekend papers about some celebrity saying, "I gave up my 4×4 and now I've bought a Prius. Aren't I doing my bit for the environment?" They are not doing their bit for the environment. But it's not their fault. The fact is that they - we - are not being well informed. And that's part of the problem. We're not getting the information we need. The scale and the nature of the problem is simply not being communicated to us. And when we are advised to do something, it barely makes a dent in the problem. Here are some of the changes we've been asked to make recently, by celebrities who like to pronounce on this sort of thing, and by governments, who should know better than to give out this kind of nonsense as 'solutions': Switch off your mobile phone charger; wee in the shower (my favourite); buy an electric car (no, don't); use two sheets of loo roll rather than three. All of these are token gestures that miss the fundamental fact that the scale and nature of the problems we face are immense, unprecedented and possibly unsolvable.

The behavioural changes that are required of us are so fundamental that no one wants to make them. What are they? We need to consume less. A lot less. Less food, less energy, less stuff. Fewer cars, electric cars, cotton T-shirts, laptops, mobile phone upgrades. Far fewer.And here it is worth pointing out that "we" refers to the people who live in the west and the north of the globe. There are currently almost 3 billion people in the world who urgently need to consume more: more water, more food, more energy. Saying "Don't have children" is utterly ridiculous. It contradicts every genetically coded piece of information we contain, and one of the most important (and fun) impulses we have. That said, the worst thing we can continue to do - globally - is have children at the current rate. If the current global rate of reproduction continues, by the end of this century there will not be 10 billion of us. According to the United Nations, Zambia's population is projected to increase by 941% by the end of this century. The population of Nigeria is projected to grow by 349% - to 730 million people.

Afghanistan by 242%.

Democratic Republic of Congo 213%.

Gambia by 242%.

Guatemala by 369%.

Iraq by 344%.

Kenya by 284%.

Liberia by 300%.

Malawi by 741%.

Mali by 408%.

Niger by 766%.

Somalia by 663%.

Uganda by 396%.

Yemen by 299%.

Even the United States' population is projected to grow by 54% by 2100, from 315 million in 2012 to 478 million. I do just want to point out that if the current global rate of reproduction continues, by the end of this century there will not be 10 billion of us - there will be 28 billion of us.

Where does this leave us? Let's look at it like this. If we discovered tomorrow that there was an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and - because physics is a fairly simple science - we were able to calculate that it was going to hit Earth on 3 June 2072, and we knew that its impact was going to wipe out 70% of all life on Earth, governments worldwide would marshal the entire planet into unprecedented action. Every scientist, engineer, university and business would be enlisted: half to find a way of stopping it, the other half to find a way for our species to survive and rebuild if the first option proved unsuccessful. We are in almost precisely that situation now, except that there isn't a specific date and there isn't an asteroid. The problem is us. Why are we not doing more about the situation we're in - given the scale of the problem and the urgency needed - I simply cannot understand. We're spending €8bn at Cern to discover evidence of a particle called the Higgs boson, which may or may not eventually explain mass and provide a partial thumbs-up for the standard model of particle physics. And Cern's physicists are keen to tell us it is the biggest, most important experiment on Earth. It isn't. The biggest and most important experiment on Earth is the one we're all conducting, right now, on Earth itself. Only an idiot would deny that there is a limit to how many people our Earth can support. The question is, is it seven billion (our current population), 10 billion or 28 billion? I think we've already gone past it. Well past it.

Science is essentially organised scepticism. I spend my life trying to prove my work wrong or look for alternative explanations for my results. It's called the Popperian condition of falsifiability. I hope I'm wrong. But the science points to my not being wrong. We can rightly call the situation we're in an unprecedented emergency. We urgently need to do - and I mean actually do - something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don't think we will. I think we're fucked. I asked one of the most rational, brightest scientists I know - a scientist working in this area, a young scientist, a scientist in my lab - if there was just one thing he had to do about the situation we face, what would it be? His reply? "Teach my son how to use a gun."
This is an edited extract from Ten Billion, by Stephen Emmott (Penguin, £6.99)

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Humans - the real threat to life on Earth

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arth is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities have modified almost every part of our planet. In fact, we are having a profound impact on it. Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face.

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The human community is an element of the Earth community, not the other way around. All human endeavors are situated within the dynamics of the biosphere. If we wish to have sustainable institutions and enterprises, they must fit well with the processes of the Earth. The ideology of industrialism, in both capitalist and communist countries, insists that modern society lives on top of nature and should rightly use and despoil the rest of the natural world as we desire- because any loss of the ecosystems is merely an "externality" in economic thought and because any problems can be addressed later by a technological fix. We are now living through the painful consequences of that arrogant, ignorant perspective. Many of our children suffer from accumulations of mercury and other toxins in their neurological systems, environmentally related cancer is on the rise, and our air and water are increasingly polluted. Meanwhile, our ecosystems are being compromised by the spreading presence of genetically engineered organisms.

Our houses and buildings, manufacturing processes, and industrial agriculture were all designed with the assumption of an endless supply of cheap and readily available fossil fuels. Pollution and despoiling the land were not part of the thinking. The Green Party, however, is optimistic about the alternatives that now exist and that could be encouraged through tax policy and the market incentives of fuel efficiency. We also challenge the grip of the oil, automotive, and automobile insurance industries that have managed to block or roll back progress in public mass transit. The gutting of subsidies for the railroads has meant not only fewer passenger routes but also the addition of thousands of large freight trucks on our highways, decreasing public safety and increasing pollution. We are committed to extending the greening of waste management by encouraging the spread of such practices as reduce, return, reuse, and recycle. We strongly oppose the recent attempts to roll back the federal environmental protection laws that safeguard our air, water, and soil.

The health of the life-support systems- the ecosystems on our continent - is of paramount importance. Inherent in the efficient dynamics of those ecosystems is a vital profusion of biodiversity. Therefore, the Greens call for a halt to the destruction of habitats, which are being sacrificed to unqualified economic expansion. We humans have a moral responsibility to all of our relations, many of which are facing extinction because we carelessly and permanently halt their long evolutionary journey.

The Green Party also supports the spread of organic agriculture and the careful tending of our nation's precious remaining topsoil. We support planetary efforts to slow the ever-increasing numbers of humans pressuring the ecosystems, and we especially support the reduction of consumption of the world's raw materials by the industrialized Northern Hemisphere. We are appalled by our country's withdrawal from serious efforts to limit greenhouse gases that are contributing mightily to global climate disruption. The Green Party strongly urges the United States to adopt an actively responsible position in this crisis and to take significant action to address the problem.

A. Climate Change
OUR POSITION
Greens want to stop runaway climate change, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions at least 40% by 2020 and 95% by 2050, over 1990 levels.

Climate change is the gravest environmental, social and economic peril that humanity has ever met. Across the world, it is causing vanishing polar ice, melting glaciers, growing deserts, stronger storms, rising oceans, less biodiversity, deepening droughts, as well as more disease, hunger, strife and human misery. It is a tragedy unfolding in slow motion.

Greenhouse gases warm the Earth by trapping heat in the atmosphere. Much of that heat is initially absorbed by the ocean, creating roughly a 30-year delay in the impact of that heat at the surface of the planet. Practically speaking, that means that the melting glaciers and expanding deserts of 2009 were the result of greenhouse gases dumped into the atmosphere in the late 1970s, when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was below 350 parts per million (ppm). To return to a safe level of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere, we must reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases as quickly as possible to levels that existed before 1980, to 350ppm carbon dioxide.

Greens support science-based policies to curb climate change. We have an ambitious plan to make drastic changes quickly to avert global catastrophe. We will expend maximum effort to preserve a planet friendly to life as we know it by curtailing greenhouse gas emissions and actively removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
GREEN SOLUTIONS 1. Strong International Climate Treaty
The climate treaty reached in Paris in December, 2015 is inadequate to address the climate change crisis.

The 195 nations involved pledged to reduce greenhouse gases. The pledges are not mandatory, however. The treaty does not require the phase out of fossil fuels, and it delays higher aid levels for poorer nations until 2025.

We call for legally binding commitments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2020 and a 95% reduction by 2050 over 1990 levels. We also call for the immediate assumption of responsibility by wealthy nations to financially assist poorer countries struggling with the effects of climate change.
2. Economic Policy For A Safer Climate

1. Enact a Fee & Dividend system on fossil fuels to enable the free market to include the environmental costs of their extraction and use. These fees shall be applied as far upstream as possible, either when fuel passes from extraction to refining, distribution or consumption; or when it first enters the United States' jurisdiction. The carbon fee will initially be small, a dime per kilogram of carbon, to avoid creating a shock to the economy. The fee will be increased by 10% each year that global atmospheric carbon dioxide content is greater than 350 ppm, decreased 10% each year it's less than 300 ppm, and repealed entirely when it falls below 250 ppm.

2. Although imported fossil fuel has no more impact on global climate change than domestic, importing petroleum and natural gas has a catastrophic impact on American foreign policy and the American economy. We will enact this same fee on imported fossil fuels a second time to give the free market an incentive to wean America off foreign oil and gas.

3. The Green Party calls for elimination of subsidies for fossil fuels, nuclear power, biomass and waste incineration and biofuels. We must also acknowledge that the bulk of our military budget is, in fact, an indirect subsidy for oil & gas corporations.

4. To prevent perverse incentives arising from higher carbon prices, the Green Party mandates clean fuels in addition to pricing carbon. Otherwise dirty energy sources like nuclear power, biomass and biofuels that are not subject to carbon pricing will become economically competitive.

3. Repay Our Climate Debt

1. Pay for adaptation to climate change in countries with less responsibility for climate change.

2. Provide a carbon neutral development path for those countries that can no longer be permitted to develop in the same way we did-by burning cheap fossil fuels.

4. More Efficiency And Conservation

1. Adopt energy efficiency standards that reduce energy demand economy-wide by 50% over the next 20-30 years. The U.S. can make massive reductions in its energy use through a combination of conservation and efficiency measures. We don't actually need any additional power. Instead, we can and should reduce our consumption of power.

2. Build an efficient, low cost public transportation system. The best incentive we can provide to live closer to work and reduce the use of private vehicles is to make the alternative inexpensive and convenient to use.

3. Adopt a national zero waste policy. The less we consume and throw away, the less we will need to produce and replace.

5. Clean, Green Energy and Jobs

1. Create an inclusive program to train workers for the new, clean energy economy. Focusing on both the environment and social justice, prioritize the creation of green jobs in communities of color and low-income communities.

2. Transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, with at least 80 percent achieved by 2030, using wind, solar, ocean, small-scale hydro, and geothermal power. Renewable energy is technically and economically feasible. The barriers to a renewable energy economy come from economic, political and social interests, and are not technical.

3. End the use of nuclear power. Nuclear energy is massively polluting, dangerous, financially risky, expensive and slow to implement. Our money is better spent on wind, solar, geothermal, conservation and small-scale hydroelectric.

4. Stop "dirty clean energy." Many of the "solutions" offered in climate legislation aren't real solutions. Biomass incineration (trees, crops, construction debris and certain types of waste), landfill gas and many types of biofuels will dump massive quantities of toxic pollutants into the air and water, and some of these energy sources produce more greenhouse gas emissions than coal. Natural gas is primarily methane, which is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Consequently, when pipeline leakage is considered, the clean-burning characteristics of natural gas can be lost, resulting in a fuel with climate impacts as bad as coal. Biomass and biofuels will also increase deforestation, contributing to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

6. Clean, Green Agriculture

1. Convert U.S farm and ranchland to organic practices. Chemical and industrial agriculture produces 35-50% of climate destabilizing greenhouse gases.

2. Switch to local food production and distribution. Localized, organic food production and distribution reduce fossil fuel usage and enriches soil that sequesters more carbon dioxide.

3. Reduce methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases by rapidly phasing out confined animal feeding operations, and encouraging a reduction in meat consumption.

B. Energy

The United States has a high-energy-consumption economy based mainly on fossil energy. The extraction, refining, and combustion of fossil fuels have proved extremely harmful to the environment, and supplies are rapidly being depleted. Over the past century, the infrastructure of our civilization has become utterly dependent on plentiful oil, coal, and natural gas: vast land, air, and sea transportation networks; increasing dependence on imported goods; industrialized food production dependent on fertilizer and biocides; and sprawling, car-dependent neighborhoods and workplaces. Our electric grid depends on fossil fuels for two-thirds of its energy.

Dirty and dangerous energy sources have generated an unparalleled assault on the environment and human rights. In the U.S., low income communities and communities of color bear the greatest burden of health impacts due to exposure to emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants. Native American communities have been devastated by uranium mining, and the people of Appalachia watch helplessly as their ancient mountains are destroyed for coal-fired electricity. Regional and global peaks in supply are driving up costs and threatening wars and social chaos. [ See section on Climate Change, above]

Since 1859 when the first commercial oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania, the global community has consumed about half what nature generated over hundreds of millions of years. Although coal is more abundant than oil, it is inherently dirtier than oil, is limited in terms of its use as a vehicle fuel, and demand is skyrocketing globally for use in electricity generation. Natural Gas is also in high demand for power production and is ultimately finite. We must plan and prepare for the end of fossil fuels now, while we still have energy available to build the cleaner, more sustainable energy infrastructure that we will soon need.

To simply substitute better energy sources in place of fossil fuels is not the answer for two main reasons. First, there are no energy sources (renewable or otherwise) capable of supplying energy as cheaply and in such abundance as fossil fuels currently yield in the time that we need them to come online. Second, we have designed and built our infrastructure to suit the unique characteristics of oil, natural gas, and coal.

The energy transition cannot be accomplished with a minor retrofit of existing energy infrastructure. Just as our fossil fuel economy differs from the agrarian economy of 1800, the post-fossil fuel economy of 2050 will be profoundly different from all that we are familiar with now. Changes would occur if we wait for the price of fossil fuels to reflect scarcity, forcing society to adapt; however, lack of government planning will result in a transition that is chaotic, painful, destructive, and possibly not survivable.

The Green Party advocates a rapid reduction in energy consumption through energy efficiency and a decisive transition away from fossil and nuclear power toward cleaner, renewable, local energy sources. Toward these goals, we advocate:
1. Encourage Conservation
Encourage conservation and a significant decrease in our energy consumption, institute national energy efficiency standards.

With five percent of the world's population, U.S residents consume twenty-six percent of the world's energy. U.S. consumption of electricity is almost nine times greater than the average for the rest of the world. These are not sustainable levels.

1. The U.S. must retrofit its building stock for energy efficiency. Most U.S. residents live in homes that require heat during the winter, and most are inadequately insulated. Buildings in the South require air conditioning during the summer. Fuel shortages, power outages, and energy price hikes could bring not just discomfort, but a massive increase in mortality from cold and heat. Millions of buildings can and must be super-insulated and, as much as possible, provided with alternative heat sources (passive solar, geothermal, or district heating).

2. Energy efficiency standards similar to those in California must be adopted nationally. The energy efficiency standards adopted there in the late 1970s have resulted in overall electricity-use remaining flat over the past three decades while the population has steadily increased. During the same time period electricity use in the rest of the U.S. has climbed along with population growth.

3. There are many different ways to increase energy efficiency and the best path for one region of the country might differ from that of another. We will need concerted effort to increase efficiency in every sector of our economy. Technologies exist that, if widely implemented, can result in huge energy savings.

4. Cogeneration and use of waste heat to generate electricity should be encouraged.

5. A carbon tax, which the Green Party supports, would serve as an important market incentive to increase efficiency.

2. Move to Renewable Sources
Move decisively to an energy system based on solar, wind, geo-thermal, marine, and other cleaner renewable energy sources.

The development of Earth-gentle, sustainable energy sources must be a cornerstone of any plan to reduce reliance on conventional fossil fuels. The Green Party advocates clean renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, marine-based, and other cleaner renewable sources as the long-term solution.
3. Eliminate dirty & dangerous energy sources
The Green Party advocates the phase-out of nuclear and coal power plants. All processes associated with nuclear power are dangerous, from the mining of uranium to the transportation and disposal of the radioactive waste. Coal is the largest contributor to climate change with estimates as high as 80%.

The generation of nuclear waste must be halted. It is hazardous for thousands of years and there is no way to isolate it from the biosphere for the duration of its toxic life. We oppose public subsidies for nuclear power. Cost is another huge factor making it unfeasible, with each new nuclear power plant costing billions of dollars.

The Green Party calls for a formal moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power plants, the early retirement of existing nuclear power reactors, and the phase-out of technologies that use or produce nuclear waste, such as nuclear waste incinerators, food irradiators, and all uses of depleted uranium.

We call for a ban on mountaintop removal coal mining. With limited supplies and in the absence of commercially viable "clean coal" carbon sequestration, which may never be feasible, coal is neither an economically nor an environmentally sustainable solution.

We call for the cessation of development of fuels produced with polluting, energy-intensive processes or from unsustainable or toxic feed stocks, such as genetically-engineered crops, coal and waste streams contaminated with persistent toxics.

We oppose further oil and gas drilling or exploration on our nation's outer continental shelf, on our public lands, in the Rocky Mountains, and under the Great Lakes.

Due to serious negative impacts on food, soil, and water, we oppose industrial-scale biofuels production and biomass burning for electric power generation. We approve small scale distributed production under local control, such as production of biodiesel from waste oils, production of charcoal and byproducts from wood wastes or sustainably harvested wood, small scale production of ethanol from crop wastes or maize stalk sugar, or production of fuel gas for localized electricity generation from anaerobic methane digesters or charcoal gasifiers. We do not object to the utilization of fuel gases seeping from landfills, as that is one way to reduce air pollution. We support as a minimum standard the Principles for Sustainable Biomass statement signed by Clean Water Action, Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Working Group, Friends of the Earth, Geos Institute, Greenpeace USA, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Southern Environmental Law Center, Union of Concerned Scientists, The Wilderness Society, and World Wildlife Fund.

The Green Party stands for the enactment of bans on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and oil on the local, state and federal level and stands for bans on the disposal of wastes created by the fracking industry.
4. Decentralize the Grid
Plan for decentralized, bioregional electricity generation and distribution.

Decentralized power systems are likely to be more resilient in the face of power disruptions and will cut transmission losses, assure citizens greater control of their power grids, and prevent the massive ecological and social destruction that accompanies production of electricity in mega-scale projects.

1. We support"smart grid"upgrades. The federal government must step in to set goals and standards and to provide capital. This effort must not favor commercial utilities over municipal power districts.

2. The Green Party supports net metering to make decentralized energy production economically viable.

3. Greens support tax-exempt bonds to finance public ownership of utilities and to allow publicly owned utilities to finance conservation and renewable energy projects.

4. We oppose deregulation of the energy industry.

5. Re-localize the Food System
De-carbonize and re-localize the food system.

Our national industrial food system is overwhelmingly dependent upon oil and natural gas for farm-equipment fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and the transport. It is responsible for over 12% of all greenhouse gases from human activities in the U.S. New farming methods, new farmers, and a re-localization of production and distribution are needed. These will require land reform, an investment in revitalizing rural areas and the creation of local food processing plants and storage centers. Laws and incentives affecting the food system (including food safety laws and farm subsidies) will need to be rewritten to provide preferential support for small-scale, local, low-input producers.
6. Electrify the Transportation System
Our enormous investment in highways, airports, cars, buses, trucks, and aircraft is almost completely dependent on oil, and it will be significantly handicapped by higher fuel prices, and devastated by actual fuel shortages. The electrification of road-based vehicles is a must and will require at least two decades to fully deploy and we must move to Earth-gentle electricity generation to charge the vehicles. Meanwhile, existing private automobiles must be put to use more efficiently through carpooling, car-sharing, and ride-sharing networks. [ See Transportation section below for more, including need for dramatic increase in CAFE or gasoline efficiency standards]
7. Requirements for Energy Transition

1. Investment: Enormous amounts of investment capital will be needed to accomplish the energy transition, much more than the promise of $150 billion for renewable energy over ten years, and must now come from government.

2. Coordination: The energy transition will be complex and comprehensive, and its various strategies will be mutually impacting. For example, efforts to redirect transport away from highways and toward rail service will need to be coordinated with manufacturers, farmers, retailers, and employers. An independent federal Energy Transition Office should track and manage the transition.

3. Education: Community colleges should prepare workers for new job opportunities, e.g., sustainable food production, renewable energy installation, grid rebuilding, rail expansion, public transport construction, and home energy retrofitting. Grade school curriculum should include gardening programs in all schools and increased emphasis on energy conservation.

4. Public Messaging & Goal Setting: Our leaders must instill in the nation a sense of collective struggle and of a long journey toward a clear goal. The success of a project of this scope will require public buy-in at every stage and level, including the use of language and images to continually underscore what is at stake, to foster a spirit of cooperation and willing sacrifice.

Business leaders, advertising agencies and even Hollywood must be enlisted, a quid pro quo for government bail out of banks and corporations. Grassroots initiatives, such as the Transition Towns movement, could lead the way toward voluntary community efforts. A sophisticated, interactive, web-based program would inspire action and provide resources. Ratepayers should get full disclosure of the specific electric generating facilities used to produce their electricity.

A series of challenging yet feasible targets should be set, with the ultimate goal-complete freedom from fossil fuel dependency - to be achieved by 2050. The federal government should take the lead by setting targets for federal facilities. Achievement of annual targets should be cause for public celebration.

D. Nuclear Issues

1. The Green Party recognizes that there is no such thing as nuclear waste "disposal." All six of the "low-level" nuclear waste dumps in the United States have leaked. There are no technological quick fixes that can effectively isolate nuclear waste from the biosphere for the duration of its hazardous life. Therefore, it is essential that generation of additional nuclear wastes be stopped.

2. The Green Party calls for the early retirement of nuclear power reactors as soon as possible (in no more than five years), and for a phase-out of other technologies that use or produce nuclear waste. These technologies include non-commercial nuclear reactors, reprocessing facilities, nuclear waste incinerators, food irradiators, and all commercial and military uses of depleted uranium.

3. Current methods of underground storage are a danger to present and future generations. Any nuclear waste management strategy must be based on waste containers being stored above ground and continuously monitored, and the containers must be retrievable and capable of being repackaged. All such strategies must also minimize the transportation of wastes.

4. The Green Party strongly opposes any shipment of high-level nuclear waste across the U.S. to the proposed Nevada waste repository at Yucca Mountain, or any other centralized facility. The Green Party believes that this proposal is part of a move to re-fire a fast-track, commercial nuclear industry by providing a means for "safe disposal." We deny there is such a thing as safe disposal of nuclear waste.

We propose making spent reactor fuel and other high level wastes safer by vitrification at the site where it is produced or now stored.

5. We call for cancellation of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the nation's first weapons complex nuclear dump in southern New Mexico.

6. We call for independent, public-access radiation monitoring at all nuclear facilities
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7. We support applicable environmental impact statements (EIS) and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis with citizen participation at all nuclear sites.

8. We support an immediate and intensive campaign to educate the public about nuclear problems, including disposal, cleanup, and long-term dangers.

9. We oppose the export of nuclear technologies or their wastes to other nations.

10. We oppose public subsidies for nuclear power, including Price-Anderson insurance caps and stranded cost recovery bailouts. We oppose federal loan guarantees to enable the construction of a new generation of nuclear reactors.

11. We oppose the development and use of new nuclear reactors, plutonium (MOX) fuel, nuclear fuel reprocessing, nuclear fusion, uranium enrichment, and the manufacturing of new plutonium pits for a new generation of nuclear weapons.

12. We oppose the deregulation of radioactive materials and wastes, which is allowing such wastes to be recycled into consumer products and to enter municipal waste landfills and incinerators. We call for the strict regulation, tracking, monitoring, and recapturing of radioactive materials and wastes.

13. We call on the military to clean up depleted uranium contamination from testing ranges and battlefields and to fully compensate exposed veterans and civilians who have been affected by depleted uranium exposure in the U.S. and elsewhere.

D. Transportation

The Green Party supports a transportation policy that emphasizes the use of mass transit and alternatives to the automobile and truck for transport. We call for major public investment in mass transportation, so that such systems are cheap or free to the public and are safe, accessible, and easily understandable to first-time users. We need ecologically sound forms of transportation that minimize pollution and maximize efficiency.

Surfaces impermeable to rainwater, polluted storm run-off; paved over or polluted wetlands, the heat island effect, air pollution, and acid rain are all directly related to a transportation system run amuck.

Massive subsidies to the auto and fossil fuel industries, as well as an unworkable approach by urban planners, maintain the auto's dominance of our cityscapes. The present-day approach of upgrading streets to accommodate increased traffic generates new traffic because access is now easier, and people will now take jobs further from their homes or purchase homes further from their jobs. Some people shift from public transit to private cars due to the trip time in cars being shorter. As patronage for public transit decreases, public transit loses funding, becomes less viable, and service deteriorates thus encouraging even more people to use their cars.

To counteract these trends and reduce auto use, the Green Party advocates the following strategies:
1. Pedestrians and Bicyclists

1. Make streets, neighborhoods and commercial districts more pedestrian friendly.

2. Increase the greenery of streets.

3. Utilize traffic-calming methods, where the design of streets promotes safe speeds and safe interaction with pedestrians. Create auto-free zones.

4. Develop extensive networks of bikeways, bicycle lanes and paths. Include bike racks on all public transit.

5. Maintain free community bicycle fleets, and provide necessary support for cyclists.

2. Mass Transit

1. Redirect resources that currently go to enhancing auto capacity into expanding human-scale transit options.

2. Develop affordable mass transit systems that are more economical to use than private vehicles.

3. Encourage employer subsidies of transit commuter tickets for employees, funded by government Congestion Management grants.

4. Use existing auto infrastructure for transit expansion where possible. Light rail could be established in expressway medians through metropolitan high-density corridors.

5. Include land use decisions in transportation issues, with consideration of the need for mass transit to have a market and be viable, and with attention paid to crosscommuting the practice of people commuting to a place where they could and should live.

6. Expand our country's network of rail lines, including high-speed regional passenger service.

7. Transfer ownership and operation of all intercity railroad trackage currently under control of freight railroads to responsible and adequately funded public agencies, as is done with highways, to provide for efficiency and safety of all rail traffic.

3. Motor Vehicles 4. Air Travel

1. Make airports accessible by local transit systems.

2. Legislate further incremental reductions in airplane noise and air pollution.

3. Emphasize the use of light and heavy rail for freight transportation.

5. Freight
We call for incentives to get long-distance truck hauling off of our highways and on to railways. We favor the removal of any administrative impediments to efficient long-haul freight transport by rail. Time is lost when switching goods from one railroad to another, even when the trains are the same size and gauge, and this waste can be eliminated.

E. Zero Waste: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
OUR POSITION
Greens will shift our nation toward clean production and principles of zero waste.

A waste-free society is essential to public health and the integrity and sustainability of the biosphere. Natural ecosystems are self-sustaining and generate no waste. We humans are a part of these ecosystems, and while we obtain resources from them, we have a responsibility to return only those things that can be re-absorbed without detriment. Waste is not an inevitable part of production and consumption, as it is viewed in the current economic model.
GREEN SOLUTIONS
F. Clean Air and Ozone Depletion

The strict, comprehensive protections of the Clean Air Act must be maintained and enhanced if we are to keep in place effective federal programs that deal with urban smog, toxic air pollution, acid rain, and ozone depletion. State and local clean air initiatives should advance and improve national efforts; for example, moving forward with stricter clean air and fuel efficiency standards, and with vehicle and fleet conversions.

GPUS recognizes the positive contributions for controlling ozone-destroying substances that have been made by the Montreal Protocol of 1987 and subsequent amendments thereto. Problems still exist, however. Some of the chemical replacements for CFCs also damage the ozone layer or are potent greenhouse gases. These include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and Very Short-Lived Substances (VSLS) such as dichloromethane and other chlorine gases.

GPUS supports further research on the damaging effects of VSLS on the ozone layer and finding replacements for those causing destruction of ozone, and immediately phasing out their use. We call for updated amendments to the Montreal Protocol to keep it consistent with current scientific findings regarding threats to the ozone layer.

G. Land Use
OUR POSITION
Land use policies must promote sustainable development and respect ecology.

Unlimited growth on a finite planet cannot be sustained.

There is a fundamental difference between growth and development and between quantity and quality. Rather than exploiting the Earth for short-term gain, Greens believe in living in sustainable balance with it. Land use practices must be founded on stewardship of the Earth, to honor the interconnected and interdependent nature of all life, to respect ecosystems and other species, while at the same time providing for human needs in a responsible and sustainable way.

Only an economics that is based upon environmental health is sustainable.
GREEN SOLUTIONS Land ownership and property rights

1. Insist that every property right has an implied responsibility to provide for the common good of people, places and the planet.

2. Encourage the formation and operation of cooperatives, non-profits, land trusts, co-housing, and other forms of communal and public interest management of land and resources.

3. Promote livable urban environments to minimize urban sprawl. Promote urban infill with affordable housing, mass transit, schools, jobs, health care, public spaces, bicycle and walking paths, community gardens, open spaces, parks, playgrounds, and urban growth boundaries.

4. Green our cities with green belts, energy-efficient infill, distributed solar and wind generation, gray water systems, under grounding of wires and pipelines, redevelopment of brown fields, closed loop, energy-producing sewage systems, watershed protection and urban agriculture.

5. Restore damaged urban ecosystems.

6. Consider the carrying capacities of the bioregions in which our cities are located and attempt to match urban populations to these natural limitations.

7. Support environmental justice policies that give communities a voice in planning future development with the goal of preventing concentration of polluting industries and practices in poor and/or minority communities.

8. Preserve and expand rural land use patterns that promote open space, healthy ecosystems, wildlife corridors and the ecologically sustainable agriculture. Protect and expand large continuous tracts of public and private land for wildlife habitat and biological diversity, to permit healthy, self-managing wildlife populations to exist in a natural state, and to promote complete ecosystems.

9. Promote livable rural communities to minimize urban migration.

10. Transition rural communities into sustainable relationships with ranching, agriculture, forestry and mining.

11. Reward farmers and ranchers for the ecosystem services they provide on private and public lands. Favor policies that promote mall-scale farmers and ranchers over large-scale corporate agriculture and ranching.

12. Repeal the General Mining Law of 1872.

13. Enact mining reforms to better balance mining with other important public land uses; provide a fair financial return to taxpayers for resources extracted, and create a fund for clean up of abandoned mines. Enact tough new environmental safeguards to protect against mining pollution, including strict curbs on mercury emissions from metal mines.
Eliminate public subsidies for livestock grazing on public lands. Raise grazing fees on public land to approximate fair market value.

14. Oppose the sale of any portion our national parks, forests or coastlines. Fund and maintain public lands in a healthy and productive state. Oppose commercial privatization of the management of these lands.

15. Ensure public ownership of natural resources located on public lands. Halt federal mineral, oil and gas, and resource giveaways, "royalty holidays," and flagrant concessions to the mining, energy and timber industries on public lands.

16. Restore and remediate damaged ecosystems on public lands.

17. Protect old growth forests, ban clear cutting and ban industrial timber harvest on public lands. Minimize road building on public lands.

18. Ban indiscriminate wildlife "damage control practices" and abolish Wildlife Services.

H. Water

Water is essential to all forms of life. The Green Party calls for an international declaration that water belongs to the Earth and all of its species. Water is a basic human right! The U.S. Government must lead the way in declaring water a fundamental human right and prevent efforts to privatize, export, and sell for profit a substance that is essential to all life.

We face a worldwide water crisis. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people lack access to safe drinking water. If current trends persist, by 2025 as much as two-thirds of the world's population will be living with a serious scarcity of water. Multinational corporations recognize these trends and are moving fast to monopolize water supplies around the world. They argue that privatizing water is the best way to allocate this valuable resource, and they are scheming to have water declared a human need so that it can be commodified and sold on the open market ensuring that the allocation of water will be based on principles of scarcity and profit maximization.

We do not agree. With water sold to the highest bidder, the rich will have plenty while the poor will be left with little but polluted water. Short-term profits will preclude any concern for long term sustainability. We must stop this privatization before the infrastructures become so established that it will be impossible to avoid a disaster of epic proportions.

Governments are signing away their control over their domestic water supplies by participating in trade treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and in institutions such as the World Trade Organization. The World Bank recently adopted a policy of water privatization and full-cost water pricing.

1. We need strong national and international laws to promote conservation, reclaim polluted water systems, develop water-supply restrictions, ban toxic and pesticide dumping, control or ban corporate farming, and bring the rule of law to transnational corporations that pollute water systems. Mining and depleting the present underground aquifers must be severely restricted. Implement strong laws to promote conservation, reclaim polluted water systems, develop water-supply restrictions, ban toxics and pesticide dumping, control corporate farming, and bring the rule of law to trans-state and trans-national operations that pollute water systems

2. Greens oppose the privatization of water and demand that the U.S. government pass strong laws with effective enforcement mechanisms to assure a safe and adequate supply of water for its citizens and all life within its borders.

3. Decisions about water must be based on an ecosystems approach. Use an ecosystems/watershed approach to ensure responsible water use. All stakeholders need to participate in the planning. Environmental justice, ecological impact, and depletion of groundwater supplies need to be integrated with the ongoing process for approval of new withdrawals
Cycles of intense drought and flooding have demonstrated the need to reorient our priorities in order to achieve a truly sustainable water policy. Over-development and poor planning have resulted in increasing rain-impermeable areas, which compounds the severity and frequency of flooding and pollution in regions downstream. We must begin to understand and apply a holistic watershed approach to managing our water resources. The principle of bioregionalism (living within the means of a region's natural resources) should give direction to future water policies.

4. Conservation must be an essential part of any water policy. Water conservation also reduces energy consumption and pollution. To conserve water, the Green Party proposes to:

1. Mandate water efficient appliances and fixtures be used in all new construction, and promote retrofitting of older buildings.

2. Promote native landscaping and other drought resistant/ climate-appropriate plants, in order to reduce the need for irrigation.

3. Promote drip irrigation systems where irrigation is necessary.

4. Eliminate storm water pollution of our water resources through education of our citizens, enforcement of our laws, and holistic watershed management.

5. Promote storm water technologies that detain, treat, filtrate, and use storm waters near where it is collected.

6. Promote the appropriate reuse of the "gray" and "black" waters we produce. Use separation techniques, such as dual piping systems where pure water is used for drinking and washing, and reclaimed water is used for lawn watering and similar purposes.

7. Mandate pre-treatment of industrial wastes to eliminate the presence of metals, solvents, and other toxins in sewer water. This would reduce the cost of municipal treatment and encourage wastewater reuse.

8. Promote and maintain passive and natural systems (such as wetlands) for water and wastewater treatment where appropriate, and enforce regulations against dumping of pollutants through regional Water Quality Control Boards.

9. Eliminate water subsidies for corporate agribusiness. Higher water prices give agribusiness incentives to conserve.

10. Assist community organizations to monitor the use of local resources, and to oversee the enforcement of water quality regulations. Preserve and restore the nation's natural water features (streams, rivers, lakes, bays, wetlands and groundwater aquifers) that are vital to achieving sustainable use of water resources.

5. Set health and sustainability water quality guidelines for drinking water supported by the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Regulations are needed or need improvement, for example, for arsenic, bacteria, viruses, protozoa, fluoridation chemical species such as fluoride and fluorosilicate, water disinfection-by-products, environmental estrogens, and pharmaceuticals (medicines).

6. Achieve a truly sustainable water policy in the light of climate change considering, for example, snow packs, aquifer recharge, rising sea levels, and available water supplies.

7. Oppose the disproportional political influences of the petroleum, corporate agriculture, mining, timber, real estate and development industries, while working to support family farms, open space, the protection of water quality in our rivers, conservation of watersheds, and the sustainable use and preservation of healthy forest.

8. Integrate land use with water use for urban planning decisions. Political bodies, such as municipal water authorities, need to be more inclusive in the representation of users, hydrologists, environmental health professionals, and environmental advocates in the region and address the issues affecting the regional supply and demand of the resource, as well as water quality. Presently, the interests and concerns of real estate and development interests have a disproportionate voice in new allocations.

I. Agriculture

Food is a necessity and a fundamental human right. All people have a right to adequate, safe, nutritional and high quality food; and those who grow it have a right to a fair return for their labor.

Our current food system is dominated by centralized agribusiness and unsustainable practices that threaten our food security, degrade the environment, destroy communities, and squeeze out family farmers. Our so-called cheap food comes at the expense of the exploitation of our farmers along with the oppression of third world peoples, inhumane treatment of animals, pollution of air and water, and degradation of our land.

The agricultural system for the 21st Century must provide a high quality of life for farmers, nutritious and safe food for consumers, and reward farming methods that enhance the quality of water, soil, and air, and the beauty of the landscape.

According to the 2006 United Nations "Livestock's Long Shadow" report and the World Watch Institute's 2009 article "Livestock and Climate Change," the livestock sector is one of the most significant contributors to our most serious environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

J. Biological Diversity

Humanity must share the planet with all other species. Our continuing destruction of animal habitats threatens an ever-growing number of species with extinction. This not only deprives these species of their existence, but will deprive future human generations of the enrichment of having these species on the Earth.

Ecological systems are diverse and interlocking, and nature's survival strategy can best be found in the adaptability that comes as a result of biological diversity. All policies concerning human settlement, food, energy, natural resources, water, coastal development, and industrialization should be formulated to prevent further disruption of the non-human ecosystems' ability to maintain themselves.

K. Ethical Treatment Of Animals

Cruelty to animals is repugnant and criminal. The mark of a humane and civilized society lies in how we treat the least protected among us. To extend rights to other sentient, living beings is our responsibility and a mark of our place among all of creation. We call for an intelligent, compassionate approach to the treatment of animals.

We reject the belief that our species is the center of creation, and that other life forms exist only for our use and enjoyment. Our species does not have the right to exploit and inflict violence on other creatures simply because we have the desire and power to do so. Our ethic upholds not only the value of biological diversity and the integrity and continuity of species, but also the value of individual lives and the interest of individual animals.

The Green Party advocates humane treatment of animals with the following policies:

L. Forestry Practices

From oxygen production to water conservation to carbon sinks to stratospheric ozone regulation to medicines and homes for all kinds of creatures, forests are indispensable to human and animal life and must be protected.

Globally, the planet has already lost 50% of our pre-colonial forests and the plant and animal communities they supported. Our rapidly increasing numbers, high-consumption rates, and profit incentives have resulted in massive forest destruction due to logging and development, and the Earth's remaining rain forests are being destroyed and transformed into cattle pastures or mono-crops for bio-fuels production.

The increase in tree die-off in the U.S. and elsewhere in the last few decades is alarming. The causes are multiple: pests, diseases, climate change, acid rain, other forms of pollution, and increased UV radiation due to our thinned ozone layer.

In our Eastern woodlands, for example, the normal pre-pollution background mortality rate would be 0.5 to 0.7% per year. That translates to the death of one tree out of 100 living trees each year. Anything over a 2 or 3% mortality rate per year is considered a disaster. Yet, we are now witnessing local tree die-offs of 30 to 40% and even higher!

The fact is that the pollution inherent to our industrial production and lifestyles has weakened the resistance of the interconnected ecosystems we call forests. Malnourished due to acid rain's destruction of their roots, and bombarded by unusually high UV radiation, our forests are falling victim to a host of diseases and pests. Forestry practices such as clearcutting also destroy the mycorrhizal fungi with which trees have a symbiotic relationship, and regeneration is slowed or impossible.

The Green Party calls for actions to protect our forests:

M. Ocean Protection
OUR POSITION
Our oceans, with their enormous diversity of life and function, are essential to life on Earth and must be preserved.

Our oceans are threatened by climate change, pollution, whaling, over fishing, factory fishing, bottom trawling, by catch, pirate fishing and fish farming. Simple, strong policy changes can rejuvenate the health of our oceans and planet.
GREEN SOLUTIONS

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The human community is an element of the Earth community, not the other way around. All human endeavors are situated within the dynamics of the biosphere. If we wish to have sustainable institutions and enterprises, they must fit well with the processes of the Earth.

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•Everything is related in some way
•All relationships are purposeful
•Relationships change over time

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Forests cover 31% of the land area on our planet. They help people thrive and survive by, for example, purifying water and air and providing people with jobs; some 13.2 million people across the world have a job in the forest sector and another 41 million have a job that is related to the sector. Many animals also rely on forests. Eighty percent of the world's land-based species, such as elephants and rhinos, live in forests. Forests also play a critical role in mitigating climate change because they act as a carbon sink-soaking up carbon dioxide that would otherwise be free in the atmosphere and contribute to ongoing changes in climate patterns.

But forests around the world are under threat, jeopardizing these benefits. The threats manifest themselves in the form of deforestation and forest degradation. The main cause of deforestation is agriculture (poorly planned infrastructure is emerging as a big threat too) and the main cause of forest degradation is illegal logging. In 2019, the tropics lost close to 30 soccer fields' worth of trees every single minute.

Deforestation is a particular concern in tropical rain forests because these forests are home to much of the world's biodiversity. For example, in the Amazon around 17% of the forest has been lost in the last 50 years, mostly due to forest conversion for cattle ranching. Deforestation in this region is particularly rampant near more populated areas, roads and rivers, but even remote areas have been encroached upon when valuable mahogany, gold, and oil are discovered.

WWF has been working to protect forests for more than 50 years. WWF works with governments, companies, communities and other stakeholders to promote certification for responsible forest management practices, combat illegal logging, reform trade policies, protect forested areas, and more.

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Deforestation and Forest Degradation | Threats | WWF

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Forests cover 31% of the land area on our planet. They help people thrive and survive by, for example, purifying water and air and providing people with jobs; some 13.2 million people across the world have a job in the forest sector and another 41 million have a job that is related to the sector.

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The World Book Encyclopedia provides three different definitions of Ecology: the branch of biology that deals with the relation of living things to their environment and to each other, the branch of sociology that deals with the relations between human beings and their environment, and the balanced or harmonious relationship of living things to their environment.All three are appropriate and relevant to issues of sustainability.

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Eutrophication: Causes, Consequences, and Controls in Aquatic Ecosystems | Learn Science at Scitable

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Eutrophication is a leading cause of impairment of many freshwater and coastal marine ecosystems in the world. Why should we worry about eutrophication and how is this problem managed?

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Biological magnification occurs by increasing the toxicity of poisonous substances as those substances move up the food chain. An example of biological magnification and its dangers is any small fish that eats plankton that has been tainted with mercury. Hundreds of small fish might then contain just few parts of the mercury, not enough to cause major harm. On the image, the amount of mercury is measured in ppm, which means "parts per million."

A bird then might eat hundreds of the small fish, so that now instead of 200 ppm in a single fish, that bird has much higher levels of mercury. The toxin amplifies as it moves up the food chain.

Biological magnification caused a crisis with eagles, where DDT was used to control mosquitoes and other pests. Birds would accumulate toxic levels of DDT in their bodies which would cause their eggs to become fragile and break. The eagle almost became extinct, but lawmakers banned DDT and the eagle is now in recovery.

A. Finding Information: Scan the article for answers to specific questions.

1. What does PPM mean? ______________________________________
2. What chemical caused the decline of the eagle population? ______________

B. Locating evidence and supporting statements. These things are not specifically said.

3. Based on the claims made in the passage, biological magnification is a result of:

a) pollution b) climate change c) food shortages d) extinction

4. What saved the eagle population? ________________________________________

5. What type of animals are most affected by biological magnification?

a) herbivores b) omnivores c) aquatic organisms d) top predators

6. What is the author's purpose or point in this writing?

a) to convince readers to stop pollution
b) to explain the process of biological magnification
c) to compare the effects of mercury and DDT

C. Using Context Clues. Are there words in the passage that you don't understand? Good readers learn to use clues to guess at the meanings of words they don't know.

6. What is plankton? a) a type of toxin b) tiny animals c) a type of bird
7. What does amplify mean? a) to be able to hear b) become sick c) make larger
8. What does accumulate mean? a) to gather b) to chase c) to destroy

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Biological magnification occurs by increasing the toxicity of poisonous substances as those substances move up the food chain. An example of biological magnification and its dangers is any small fish that eats plankton that has been tainted with mercury. Hundreds of small fish might then contain just few parts of the mercury, not enough to cause major harm.

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Deforestation and forest degradation can happen quickly, such as when a forest is clear-cut to make way for a palm oil plantation or a new settlement. It can also happen gradually as a result of ongoing forest degradation as temperatures rise due to climate change caused by human activity.

The most common pressures causing deforestation and severe forest degradation are agriculture, unsustainable forest management, mining, infrastructure projects and increased fire incidence and intensity.

Some infrastructure activities, such as road building, have a large indirect effect through opening up forests to settlers and agriculture. Poor forest management and unsustainable fuelwood collection degrade forests and often instigate a "death by a thousand cuts" form of deforestation.

Causes of deforestation and forest degradation

Conversion of forests for other land uses, including pulp, palm, and soy plantations, pastures, settlements, roads and infrastructure.

Forest fires: Each year, fires burn millions of hectares of forest worldwide. Fires are a part of nature but degraded forests are particularly vulnerable. These include heavily logged rainforests, forests on peat soils, or where forest fires have been suppressed for years allowing unnatural accumulation of vegetation that makes the fire burn more intensely. The resulting loss has wide-reaching consequences on biodiversity, climate, and the economy.

Illegal and unsustainable logging: Illegal logging occurs in all types of forests across all continents - from Brazil to Indonesia -destroying nature and wildlife, taking away community livelihoods and distorting trade. Illegally harvested wood finds its way into major consumption markets, such as the U.S., and European Union, which further fuels the cycle.

Fuelwood harvesting: Over-harvesting for domestic use or for commercial trade in charcoal significantly damages forests.

Mining: The impact of mining on tropical forests is growing due to rising demand and high mineral prices. Mining projects are often accompanied by major infrastructure construction, such as roads, railway lines and power stations, putting further pressure on forests and freshwater ecosystems.

Climate change: Forest loss is both a cause and an effect of our changing climate. Climate change can damage forests, for instance by drying out tropical rainforests and increasing fire damage in boreal forests. Inside forests, climate change is already harming biodiversity, a threat that is likely to increase.

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Deforestation and forest degradation can happen quickly, such as when a forest is clear-cut to make way for a palm oil plantation or a new settlement. It can also happen gradually as a result of ongoing forest degradation as temperatures rise due to climate change caused by human activity.

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(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Deforestation is the permanent removal of trees to make room for something besides forest. This can include clearing the land for agriculture or grazing, or using the timber for fuel, construction or manufacturing.

Forests cover more than 30% of the Earth's land surface, according to the World Wildlife Fund. These forested areas can provide food, medicine and fuel for more than a billion people. Worldwide, forests provide 13.4 million people with jobs in the forest sector, and another 41 million people have jobs related to forests.

Forests are a resource, but they are also large, undeveloped swaths of land that can be converted for purposes such as agriculture and grazing. In North America, about half the forests in the eastern part of the continent were cut down for timber and farming between the 1600s and late 1800s, according to National Geographic.

Today, most deforestation is happening in the tropics. Areas that were inaccessible in the past are now within reach as new roads are constructed through the dense forests. A 2017 report by scientists at the University of Maryland showed that the tropics lost about 61,000 square miles (158,000 square kilometers) of forest in 2017 - an area the size of Bangladesh.

Reasons forests are destroyed

The World Bank estimates that about 3.9 million square miles (10 million square km) of forest have been lost since the beginning of the 20th century. In the past 25 years, forests shrank by 502,000 square miles (1.3 million square km) - an area bigger than the size of South Africa. In 2018, The Guardian reported that every second, a chunk of forest equivalent to the size of a soccer field is lost.

Often, deforestation occurs when forested area is cut and cleared to make way for agriculture or grazing. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) reports that just four commodities are responsible for tropical deforestation: beef, soy, palm oil and wood products. UCS estimates that an area the size of Switzerland (14,800 square miles, or 38,300 square km) is lost to deforestation every year.

Natural fires in tropical forests tend to be rare but intense. Human-lit fires are commonly used to clear land for agricultural use. First, valuable timber is harvested, then the remaining vegetation is burned to make way for crops like soy or cattle grazing. In 2019, the number of human-lit fires in Brazil skyrocketed. As of August 2019, more than 80,000 fires burned in the Amazon, an increase of almost 80% from 2018, National Geographic reported.

Many forests are cleared to make way for palm oil plantations. Palm oil is the most commonly produced vegetable oil and is found in half of all supermarket products. It's cheap, versatile and can be added to both food and personal products like lipsticks and shampoo. Its popularity has spurred people to clear tropical forests to grow more palm trees. Growing the trees that produce the oil requires the leveling of native forest and the destruction of local peatlands - which doubles the harmful effect on the ecosystem. According to a report published by Zion Market Research, the global palm oil market was valued at $65.73 billion in 2015 and is expected to reach $92.84 billion in 2021.

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Effects of deforestation

Forests can be found from the tropics to high-latitude areas. They are home to 80% of terrestrial biodiversity, containing a wide array of trees, plants, animals and microbes, according to the World Bank, an international financial institution. Some places are especially diverse - the tropical forests of New Guinea, for example, contain more than 6% of the world's species of plants and animals.

Forests provide more than a home for a diverse collection of living things; they are also an important resource for many around the world. In countries like Uganda, people rely on trees for firewood, timber and charcoal. Over the past 25 years, Uganda has lost 63% of its forest cover, Reuters reported. Families send children - primarily girls - to collect firewood, and kids have to trek farther and farther to get to the trees. Collecting enough wood often takes all day, so the children miss school.

According to a 2018 , three-quarters of the Earth's freshwater comes from forested watersheds, and the loss of trees can affect water quality. The UN's 2018 State of the World's Forests report found that over half the global population relies on forested watersheds for their drinking water as well as water used for agriculture and industry.
Related: The Latest Deforestation News Stories
Deforestation in tropical regions can also affect the way water vapor is produced over the canopy, which causes reduced rainfall. A 2019 study published in the journal Ecohydrology showed that parts of the Amazon rainforest that were converted to agricultural land had higher soil and air temperatures, which can exacerbate drought conditions. In comparison, forested land had rates of evapotranspiration that were about three times higher, adding more water vapor to the air.

Trees also absorb carbon dioxide, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity. As climate change continues, trees play an important role in carbon sequestration, or the capture and storage of excess carbon dioxide. Tropical trees alone are estimated to provide about 23% of the climate mitigation that's needed to offset climate change, according to the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit global research institute.

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Deforestation not only removes vegetation that is important for removing carbon dioxide from the air, but the act of clearing the forests also produces greenhouse gas emissions. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says that deforestation is the second-leading cause of climate change. (The first is the burning of fossil fuels.) In fact, deforestation accounts for nearly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Deforestation solutions

Developing alternatives to deforestation can help decrease the need for tree clearing. For example, the desire to expand the amount of land used for agriculture is an attractive reason to deforest an area. But if people adopted sustainable farming practices or employed new farming technologies and crops, the need for more land might be diminished, according to the UN's Sustainable Forest Management Toolbox.

Forests can also be restored, through replanting trees in cleared areas or simply allowing the forest ecosystem to regenerate over time. The goal of restoration is to return the forest to its original state, before it was cleared, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The sooner a cleared area is reforested, the quicker the ecosystem can start to repair itself. Afterward, wildlife will return, water systems will reestablish, carbon will be sequestered and soils will be replenished.
Additional resources:
Everyone can do their part to curb deforestation. We can buy certified wood products, go paperless whenever possible, limit our consumption of products that use palm oil and plant a tree when possible.

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Sarah Derouin - Live Science Contributor

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(Image credit: Shutterstock) Deforestation is the permanent removal of trees to make room for something besides forest. This can include clearing the land for agriculture or grazing, or using the timber for fuel, construction or manufacturing. Forests cover more than 30% of the Earth's land surface, according to the World Wildlife Fund .

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Habitat Loss and the Main Causes in the United States

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Habitat Loss and the Main Causes in the United States

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What is Forest Fragmentation and Why Is It a Problem?

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What is Forest Fragmentation and Why Is It a Problem?

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Photo by Blake Gardner.

Forest fragmentation is the breaking of large, contiguous, forested areas into smaller pieces of forest; typically these pieces are separated by roads, agriculture, utility corridors, subdivisions, or other human development. It usually occurs incrementally, beginning with cleared patches here and there - think Swiss cheese - within an otherwise unbroken expanse of tree cover.

Over time, those non-forest patches tend to multiply and expand until eventually the forest is reduced to scattered, disconnected forest islands. The surrounding non-forest lands and land uses seriously threaten the health, function, and value of the remaining forest.

Any large-scale canopy disturbance affects a forest, but it is important to distinguish between a forest fragmented by human infrastructure development and a forest of mixed ages and varied canopy closure that results from good forest management. The former is typically much more damaging to forest health and habitat quality, usually with permanent negative effects, whereas the latter may cause only temporary change in the forest.

The effects of fragmentation are well documented in all forested regions of the planet. In general, by reducing forest health and degrading habitat, fragmentation leads to loss of biodiversity, increases in invasive plants, pests, and pathogens, and reduction in water quality. These wide-ranging effects all stem from two basic problems: fragmentation increases isolation between forest communities and it increases so-called edge effects.

When a forest becomes isolated, the movement of plants and animals is inhibited. This restricts breeding and gene flow and results in long-term population decline. Fragmentation is a threat to natural resilience, and connectivity of forest habitats may be a key component of forest adaptation and response to climate change.

Edge effects are even more complicated. They alter growing conditions within the interior of forests through drastic changes in temperature, moisture, light, and wind. Put simply, the environment of the adjacent non-forest land determines the environment of the forest fragment, particularly on its edges. This triggers a cascade of ill effects on the health, growth, and survivability of trees, flowers, ferns, and lichens and an array of secondary effects on the animals that depend on them. Ecologists suggest that true interior forest conditions - you know, where it's hard to hear cars and lawnmowers and it remains cool, shady, and downright damp even during a three-week drought - only occur at least 200-300 feet inside the non-forest edge.

And so a circular forest island in a sea of non-forest would have to be more than 14 acres in size to include just one acre of such interior forest condition. Put differently, reports indicate that the negative habitat effects of each residential building pocket within a forest radiate outward, affecting up to 30 additional acres with increased disturbance, predation, and competition from edge-dwellers. This may not matter to generalist species like deer, raccoons, and blue jays, which may actually benefit from fragmentation, but it is hell on interior-dependent species like salamanders, goshawks, bats, and flying squirrels. The smaller the remnant the greater the influence of external factors and edge effects. A wise person once likened it to ice cubes: the smaller ones melt faster.

Moreover, as forest fragments become ever smaller, practicing forestry in them becomes operationally impractical, economically nonviable, and culturally unacceptable. In turn, we lose the corresponding and important contributions that forestry makes to our economy and culture. The result is a rapid acceleration of further fragmentation and then permanent loss.

Here is the tricky part: when fragmentation occurs in a heavily forested region like ours, at least in the early going we are still left with a largely pleasant condition. We sense that we still have lots of woods where we can work, hunt, ski, and walk the dogs. And to most of us, this seems good enough, even when the perforations expand and those woods are the scattered remains of a fragmented forest.

But is it enough? At some point when the larger forest is highly fragmented, the size, integrity, and connectivity of those wooded remnants deteriorate beyond recovery and they are no longer adequate for native forest plants and wildlife. After all, when the Swiss cheese has more holes than cheese, the whole sandwich suffers.

Michael Snyder, a forester, is Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation.

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What Is Forest Fragmentation and Why Is It A Problem? | Autumn 2014 | Articles| Woods Whys

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Photo by Blake Gardner. Forest fragmentation is the breaking of large, contiguous, forested areas into smaller pieces of forest; typically these pieces are separated by roads, agriculture, utility corridors, subdivisions, or other human development. It usually occurs incrementally, beginning with cleared patches here and there - think Swiss cheese - within an otherwise unbroken expanse of tree cover.

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There is no Nobel Prize for biology, but the discipline's top award, the International Prize of Biology, has been awarded every year since 1985 by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Of the 15 Americans who received the prize between 1985 and 2017, four were immigrants to the U.S.

Ernst Mayr, who won the prize in 1994, was honored for his work in systemic biology and taxonomy. Born in Germany in 1904, Mayr came to the U.S. to work in a curatorial position at the American Museum of Natural History. He joined Harvard's faculty in 1953.

Masatoshi Nei won the prize in 2002 for his work in evolutionary biology. He was born in Japan in 1931 and came to the U.S. to teach at Brown University and later at the University of Texas at Houston.

Biophysicist and cell biologist Shinya Inoue won the prize in 2003. He was born in Japan in 1921 and came to the U.S. to pursue graduate work at Princeton University.

Joseph Altman won the prize in 2012 for his work in neurobiology. He was born in Hungary in 1925, survived the Holocaust along with his family. They came to the United States by way of Germany and Austria. In the 1960s he discovered that adult brains could create new neurons - an insight that was overlooked until the late 1990s.

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These Four U.S. Immigrants Have Won One of Biology's Top Prizes

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There is no Nobel Prize for biology, but the discipline's top award, the International Prize of Biology, has been awarded every year since 1985 by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Of the 15 Americans who received the prize between 1985 and 2017, four were immigrants to the U.S.

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Causes, Effects, and Processes of Biomagnification 

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Causes, Effects, and Processes of Biomagnification 

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Biomagnification stands for Biological Magnification, which means the increase of contaminated substances or toxic chemicals that take place in the food chains. These substances often arise from intoxicated or contaminated environments. The contaminants include heavy metals namely mercury, arsenic, pesticides such as DDT, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) compounds which are then taken up by organisms because of the food they consume or the intoxication of their environment.

These materials are highly present in a variety of household and industrial chemicals. The harmful substances then build up inside the organism's cells. When organisms in the higher food chain consume the organisms containing the toxins below their trophic levels, the toxins gradually become concentrated in the higher food chain. Because this is a repetitive process in the ecosystem and throughout the entire food chain, the higher organisms are the ones that will accumulate most of the toxins.

According to Encyclopedia,

" Biomagnification (or bioaccumulation) refers to the ability of living organisms to accumulate certain chemicals to a concentration larger than that occurring in their inorganic, non-living environment, or in the case of animals, in the food that they eat. "

Causes of Biomagnification

The release of toxic chemicals and pollutants into the environments such as the seas, air, and land results in the accumulation of toxins and harmful substances in the environment. The concentration of these toxic chemicals and pollutants seem to be very low when released in different environments, it eventually accumulates and gets absorbed by lower organisms in the food chains such as fish, earthworms, and plants. When the lower organisms are eaten by other organism and the process goes up the trophic levels, biomagnifiaction occurs.

Agricultural pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers, among other agricultural chemicals are highly toxic and often find way into the soils, rivers or lakes and the seas through surface storm water runoff. The primary agricultural inputs including pesticides, industrial by-product wastes, some fertilizers, and specific agrochemical products contain traces of heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, mercury, copper and lead. These substances cause severe health impacts to humans and aquatic animals such as fish when indirectly ingested and accumulate in the body tissues.

Manures and Biosolids frequently contain nutrients including nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus and nitrogen. Furthermore, because they are industrially processed, they may also have within them contaminants such as personal care products (PPCPs) and pharmaceuticals. These products have been found in human and animal bodies and are believed to have negatively health impacts to wildlife, animals, and humans.

Industrial manufacturing activities and pollution

The manufacturing processes of industries indirectly or directly release toxic and harmful substances which find a way to the soils, rivers, lakes and oceans. Industrial processes pollute the environment in several ways by emitting or discharging toxic pollutants into the environment which find way into the food chain, leading to biomagnifications.

Mining activities in the deep sea is to extract minerals and metal ores like zinc, cobalt, silver, aluminum and gold destroy the oceans and the coastal regions as the mining processes generate scores of sulfide and selenium deposits in the waters. The toxicity levels build up and are absorbed by ocean creatures which are then consumed by organisms in the higher trophic levels of the food chain.

Effects of Biomagnification

Humans become more susceptible to cancers, liver and kidney failure, respiratory disorders, birth defects in pregnant women, brain damage, and heart diseases are a result of mercury, cadmium, lead, cobalt, chromium and other chemical poisoning. For instance, diseases like hepatitis and cancer have been attributed to consuming seafood that has been poisoned by mercury and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

Effects on reproduction and development of marine creatures

The various toxic chemicals and elements accumulate in the vital organs of the various aquatic creatures affecting their reproduction and development. For instance, seabird eggs are laid with thinner shells than normal, and can result in the birds crushing their eggs instead of incubating them. Selenium and heavy metals such as mercury also affect the reproduction of aquatic creatures such as fish as it destroys their reproductive organs. Besides, PCB'S (polychlorinated biphenyls) also biomagnifies and impairs reproduction and is considerable high in aquatic systems.

The coral reefs are destroyed by cyanide which is used in leaching gold and in fishing. The reefs provide for spawning, feeding, and dwelling grounds for numerous sea creatures. When destroyed, the survival of aquatic creatures is highly compromised.

Many sea creatures depend on the natural food chain for survival. When chemicals and other toxins are carried into the soils, rivers, lakes or oceans and taken up by various organisms, it disrupts the interconnected relationships within the food chain.

It happens when small animals ingest or plants absorb the toxic elements after which they are eaten by bigger animals, consequently, affecting the entire natural food chain. The creatures or plants intoxicated with substances such as mercury, copper, chromium, selenium and cobalt may also be consumed by humans and top animals in the food chain leading to susceptibility to diseases, reproductive disorders, and even deaths.

Process of Biomagnification

Biomagnification process occurs when certain toxic chemicals and pollutants such as heavy metals, pesticides or polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) compounds go up the food chain by working their way through the environment and into the soil or the water systems after which they are eaten by aquatic animals or plants, which in turn are consumed by animals, humans, and large birds. Eventually, these substances increase in concentration in the organisms as they move up the food chain because they are slowly excreted or metabolized/broken down.

Here is an explanation showing the process of biomagnification:

Release of toxic chemicals and pollutants into the environment

The process begins with the release of toxic chemicals and pollutants into the environment and eventually works their way into soils, rivers or lakes, and the seas. The concentration of these toxic chemicals and pollutants seem to be very low when released in different environments. They are very minute even in terms of weight.

Phytoplankton refers to small plants that float in the seas that normally absorb toxins. Once absorbed, the toxins stay in their tissues without being excreted or broken down. With time, the toxins accumulate to high concentrations up to 200 parts a trillion which represents a toxin accumulation increase by about four fold.

Zooplankton refers to small marine animals that float in the seas. They consume the phytoplankton and thus take in the toxin. The toxins stay locked in the organism's tissue without being excreted or broken down. Over time, the toxin concentration increases up to two parts per billion which represents about a ten-fold increase over the previous concentration.

Small fish consume the zooplankton

Whenever the small fish feed on the zooplanktons, they consequently take up the toxins which get absorbed in their fatty tissues. As a result, accumulation occurs and the concentrations build up to about 20 parts per billion which is another ten-fold increase.

Large fish graze on the smaller fish

Again, when the large fish graze on the smaller fish for food, they consume the toxins that accumulate in their fatty tissues. The concentrations become higher up to ranges of 80 to 100 parts per billion. This is about four to five fold increase in the toxic levels.

The top food chain organisms consumes the fish

The organisms at the top of the food chain including the marine mammals such as dolphin, sea birds, and humans gradually build up the toxins in their tissues such as their liver when they consume the large fish. The levels of concentrations here increase to the highest ranges of 10,000 to 15,000 parts per billion. The results impact the animal's fertility and make them vulnerable to diseases as they interfere with the normal functioning of vital organs.

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Causes, Effects and Process of Biomagnification | Earth Eclipse

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Biomagnification stands for Biological Magnification, which means the increase of contaminated substances or toxic chemicals that take place in the food chains. These substances often arise from intoxicated or contaminated environments. The contaminants include heavy metals namely mercury, arsenic, pesticides such as DDT, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) compounds which are then taken up by organisms because of the food they consume or the intoxication of their environment.

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As the world seeks to slow the pace of climate change, preserve wildlife, and support more than eight billion people, trees inevitably hold a major part of the answer. Yet the mass destruction of trees-deforestation-continues, sacrificing the long-term benefits of standing trees for short-term gain of fuel, and materials for manufacturing and construction.

We need trees for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they absorb the carbon dioxide we exhale and the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities emit. As those gases enter the atmosphere, global warming increases, a trend scientists now prefer to call climate change.

There is also the imminent danger of disease caused by deforestation.

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Deforestation and Its Effect on the Planet

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As the world seeks to slow the pace of climate change, preserve wildlife, and support more than eight billion people, trees inevitably hold a major part of the answer. Yet the mass destruction of trees-deforestation-continues, sacrificing the long-term benefits of standing trees for short-term gain of fuel, and materials for manufacturing and construction.

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http://science.jrank.org/pages/2801/Food-Chain-Web-Biomagnification.htmlhttp://science.jrank.org/pages/2801/Food-Chain-Web-Biomagnification.html

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Biomagnification (also called food web magnification or food web accumulation) is the progressive increase in the concentration of contaminants in organisms as the trophic level increases. This means lower trophic levels generally have smaller concentrations of contaminants than higher levels.

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Zalisko, Edward J. Instructor Guide Campbell Biology: Concepts & Connections, Seventh Edition by Reece, Taylor, Simon, Dickey. San Francisco, CA: Pearson Education, 2012. Print. 

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Zalisko, Edward J. Instructor Guide Campbell Biology: Concepts & Connections, Seventh Edition by Reece, Taylor, Simon, Dickey. San Francisco, CA: Pearson Education, 2012. Print. 