10 Biggest Enviornmental Issues

As inhabitants and stewards of the planet, there is a lot we can do and a lot we need to do to maintain the best possible environment for all people to live in for generations to come. But where do the greatest challenges lie?
The following list includes the 10 biggest environmental issues facing the planet today:

Climate Change—This catch-all includes rising sea levels, changes in rainfall patterns, more severe droughts and floods, harsher hurricanes and other windstorms, and new pathways for disease.

Energy—For big energy users, resource and energy productivity may become a major point of strategic advantage (or disadvantage if they don’t learn to properly utilize future and existing resources).

Water—Companies around the world now face real limits on access to water. A rising population and growing economies are putting substantial stress on resources. Pollution is increasingly a concern.

Biodiversity and Land Use—Biodiversity preserves our food chain and the ecosystems on which all life depends. A key factor in the decline of biodiversity is habitat loss. Many companies face pressure about their contribution to sprawl, yet all humans are guilty of contributing to this problem.

Chemicals, Toxics, and Heavy Metals—Part of what makes air pollution - and all forms of pollution - more dangerous is the presence of toxic elements. The legal liability surrounding toxins can turn out to be virtually unlimited.

Air Pollution—Significant air-quality controls on factories, cars and other emissions sources have radically reduced air pollution levels over the past 30 years in the United States, Japan and Europe. But the air is still not clean in many places.

Waste Management—The EPA estimates that the 1,200 Superfund sites across the country will require about $200 billion to clean up over the next 30 years. Under the liability provisions of the Superfund law, anyone found responsible for the waste at a site can be held liable for the full cost of cleanup, even if the toxins were disposed of legally at the time.

Ozone Layer Depletion—With a thinned ozone layer, the world becomes a more dangerous place, reducing agricultural productivity and increasing the risk of skin cancer and other health problems.

Oceans and Fisheries—More than 75 percent of the world’s fisheries are over-exploited and beyond sustainability. For those whose livelihoods that depend on fishing, recreation and tourism, the effect of declining fisheries may be severe. Many cultures also serve grave impacts from reduced fisheries.
 
Deforestation—Every company that uses wood, paper or even cardboard packaging has some stake in, and responsibility for, the state of our forests, both public and private.

How Water is Changing All Aspects of Life!

Diseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Children are especially vulnerable, as their bodies aren't strong enough to fight diarrhea, dysentery and other illnesses.

90% of the 30,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are in children under five years old. The WHO reports that over 3.6% of the global disease burden can be prevented simply by improving water supply, sanitation, and hygiene.

                                                             
                                                   
                                              

Ice loss by Global Warming..

Melting of Antarctica's submerged ice shelves accounts for as much as 90 per cent of ice loss in some areas, a new study suggests.

Iceberg production and melting causes 2,800 cubic kilometres of ice to leave the Antarctic ice sheet every year. Most of this is replaced by snowfall but any imbalance contributes to a change in global sea level, researchers said.

For many decades, experts have believed that the most important process responsible for this huge loss was iceberg calving - the breaking off of chunks of ice at the edge of a glacier.

New research, led by academics at the University of Bristol with colleagues at Utrecht University and the University of California, has used satellite and climate model data to prove that this sub-shelf melting has as large an impact as iceberg calving for Antarctica as a whole and for some areas is far more important.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, are crucial for understanding how the ice sheet interacts with the rest of the climate system and particularly the ocean.

During the last decade, the Antarctic ice-sheet has been losing an increasing amount of its volume. The annual turnover of ice equates to 700 times the four cubic kilometres per year.

Researchers found that, for some ice shelves, melting on its underbelly could account for as much as 90 per cent of the mass loss, while for others it was only 10 per cent.

Ice shelves which are thinning already were identified as losing most of their mass from this melting, a finding which will be a good indicator for which ice shelves may be particularly vulnerable to changes in ocean warming in the future.

The scientists used data from a suite of satellite and airborne missions to accurately measure the flow of the ice, its elevation and its thickness. These observations were combined with the output of a climate model for snowfall over the ice sheet.

They compared how much snow was falling on the surface and accumulating against how much ice was leaving the continent, entering the ocean and calving. By comparing these estimates, they were able to determine the proportion that was lost by each process.

"Understanding how the largest ice mass on the planet loses ice to the oceans is one of the most fundamental things we need to know for Antarctica. Until recently, we assumed that most of the ice was lost through icebergs," Professor Jonathan Bamber, from the University of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences, said.

"Now we realise that melting underneath the ice shelves by the ocean is equally important and for some places, far more important. This knowledge is crucial for understanding how the ice sheets interact now, and in the future, to changes in climate," said Bamber.

Enviornmentalist Sundarlal Bahuguna and The Movements..

Sunderlal Bahuguna is a noted Garhwali environmentalist, Chipko movement leader and a follower of Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of Non-violence and Satyagraha. This idea of chipko movement was of his wife and the action was taken by him. For years he has been fighting for the preservation of forests in the Himalayas, first as a member of the Chipko movement in 1970s, and later spearheaded the Anti-Tehri Dam movement starting 1980s, to early 2004. He was one of the early environmentalists of India, and later he and people associated with the Chipko movement later started taking up environmental issues, like against large dams, mining and deforestation, across the country.india pays him a tribute for his contribution for the trees.
He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian honour, on January 26, 2009.

Chipko movement

Chipko movement started in 1973 spontaneously in Uttar Pradesh, in an effort to save trees and forests from felling by forest contractors. In Hindi, "Chipko" literally means "to stick" and people started sticking to trees when it was being cut. Chipko movement later inspired Appiko Movement in Karnataka. One of Sunderlal Bahuguna's notable contributions to that cause, and to environmentalism in general, was his creation of the Chipko's slogan "Ecology is permanent economy." Sunderlal Bahuguna helped bring the movement to prominence through about 5,000-kilometer trans-Himalaya march undertaken from 1981 to 1983, travelling from village to village, gathering support for the movement. He had an appointment with the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and that meeting is credited with resulting in Ms. Gandhi's subsequent 15-year ban on felling of green trees in 1980. He was also closely associated with Gaura Devi, one of the pioneers of the movement.

Anti Tehri Dam protests

He has remained behind the anti-Tehri Dam protests for decades, he used the Satyagraha methods, and repeatedly went on hunger strikes at the banks of Bhagirathi as a mark of his protest. In 1995, he called off a 45-day-long fast following an assurance from the then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao of the appointment of a review committee on the ecological impacts of the dam, thereafter he went on another long fast another fast which lasted for 74 days at Gandhi Samadhi, Raj Ghat, during the tenure of Prime Minister, H.D. Deve Gowda, he gave personal undertaking of project review. However despite a court case which ran in the Supreme Court for over a decade, work resumed at the Tehri dam in 2001, following which he was arrested on April 20, 2001.
Eventually, the dam reservoir started filling up in 2004, and on July 31, 2004 he was finally evacuated to a new accommodation at Koti, a little hillock, along the Bhagirathi where he lives today, continues his environment work.
Sunderlal Bahuguna has been a passionate defender of the Himalayan people, working for temperance, the plight of the hill people (especially working women). He has also struggled to defend India's rivers.

Animals are beautiful people!

Animals Are Beautiful People  is a 1974 nature documentary about the wildlife in Southern Africa. The story is revolved around the Namib Desert, the Kalahari Desert and the Okavango River and Okavango Delta.

"This clip is about animals eating rotten, fermented fruit of the Marula tree. The intoxicated animals then stagger around for comic effect. In the morning, we see one baboon wake up, disheveled, next to a warthog, and quietly exit the burrow, as not to wake her."