Books on the topic 'Anthropogenic activities'

This chapter describes the natural sources that produce background levels of chemical contaminants in environmental media and the generally much larger anthropogenic sources in terms of: primary releases; and secondary sources resulting from chemical reactions within environmental media. There are primary sources within residences (personal care products, pesticides, the smoking of cigarettes, and unvented kitchen and bathroom effluents and heaters), in and around communities (furnace, power plant, and motor vehicle effluents), and effluents from industrial and commercial activities. Secondary sources include reactions between primary pollutants and natural and anthropogenic components in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere.

The last chapter of Lakes and Ponds deals with how human activities affect the natural ecosystems and their function through eutrophication, contamination, acidification, brownification and increases in UV radiation, and how such anthropogenic disturbances may affect biodiversity and the ability of organisms to utilize a specific habitat. In addition, the chapter addresses novel environmental threats, such as global climate change and effects from our everyday chemicals, such as contraceptives, nanoparticles and antidepressant drugs. However, also possibilities and signs of improvement are discussed, providing hope for coming generations.

This chapter analyzes the confluence of environmental politics, biopolitics, and the cultural role of yoga in India. It begins with an overview of India’s current economic development challenges and shows how the country’s current prime minister has subsumed both yoga bodies and water bodies into biopolitical discourse to support a neoliberal economic boom that will contribute to the proliferation of anthropogenic climate change. The chapter then argues that alternative forms of yoga aimed at nurturing intimacy between the human body and the natural world are helping to prevent unnecessary climate-change-producing development activities in India, including the river-linking project and other massive hydroelectric projects that threaten India’s riparian environments.

Chapter 9 reviews the threats imposed by human activities to aquatic life at high altitude. High altitude regions of the inter-tropical belt are generally much more densely populated than their temperate counterparts. Therefore, they are directly affected by a number of human-related disturbances such as land use changes, water contamination, use and diversion, and the introduction of invasive species. The chapter details several unique environmental conditions of high altitude environments that make their aquatic biota particularly at risk in the face of anthropogenic disturbances. Among others, glaciers concentrate pollutants, low oxygen concentrations affect the response of aquatic fauna to stress, ultraviolet B modifies the bioavailability of contaminants, high primary productivity of grasslands encourages cattle ranching and fuels fires over large scales, and isolated watersheds favour species extinction following biological invasions.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to both the anthropogenic threats facing the marine environment at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the role that international law plays in regulating humankind’s impacts on the oceans. It argues that the protection of the marine environment is a common concern of humankind, requiring the cooperation of all States in adopting appropriate international rules and standards to address the main threats to the marine environment and collective efforts to ensure the enforcement of those norms. The chapter then explains the key sources of international law that are relevant to the regulation of marine activities, highlighting the central role played by treaties, related non-binding instruments, judicial decisions, and general principles of international law. This introduction to the sources of international law provides a basic background to the more detailed analysis of specific treaties and related instruments in the remainder of the book.

This book comprises of 13 chapters, documenting the scientific expedition of the Mantanani Island. This expedition was conducted by thirty scientists and researchers from Universiti Malaysia Sabah under the fellowship of the Small Islands Research Center (SIRC). The expedition was carried out from the 8th to the 10th of April 2016, yielded new knowledge and updated previous data on the socio-cultural aspects of the inhabitants, island geology, terrestrial and marine flora and fauna, economy and ecotourism. The layout of this book was designed to present the socio-cultural aspect of the inhabitants on the island in two preliminary chapters, followed by island geology; land use; coastline changes; diversity of trees; seaweed; invertebrates; snails; groundwater as well as economic and potential ecotourism prospects of the island in its final chapter. UMS, through its implementation arm, SIRC, is committed to ensure the success of preservation and conservation of the island’s resources for future generations. Therefore, this book aims to serve as a focal point for future scientific expedition to this island. As the environment changes around us due to anthropogenic activities, it is only prudent that we document these changes in order to better understand and mitigate future disasters.

The oceans provide many vital ecosystem services for humankind, but the health of the world’s seas is in serious decline. The protection of the marine environment has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges for the international community. An effective solution depends upon the cooperation of all states towards achieving agreed objectives. International law plays a vital role in this process. This book provides a critical assessment of the international legal instruments that have been negotiated for the protection of the marine environment and identifies key trends in global ocean governance. Starting with a detailed analysis of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the book explains and evaluates the main global and regional treaties and related instruments that seek to prevent, reduce, and control damage to the marine environment caused by navigation, seabed exploitation, fishing, dumping, geo-engineering, and land-based activities, as well as emerging pressures such as ocean noise, ocean acidification, and climate change. The book demonstrates how international institutions have expanded their mandates to address a broader range of marine environmental issues and to promote an ecosystems approach to regulation. It also discusses the development of diverse regulatory tools to address anthropogenic impacts on the marine environment and the extent to which States have adopted a precautionary approach in different maritime sectors. Whilst many advances have been made, the book highlights the need for greater coordination between international institutions, as well as the desirability of developing stronger enforcement mechanisms for international environmental rules.

For several decades, the Sahelian countries have been facing continuing rainfall shortages, which, coupled with anthropogenic factors, have severely disrupted the great ecological balance, leading the area in an inexorable process of desertification and land degradation. The Sahel faces a persistent problem of climate change with high rainfall variability and frequent droughts, and this is one of the major drivers of population’s vulnerability in the region. Communities struggle against severe land degradation processes and live in an unprecedented loss of productivity that hampers their livelihoods and puts them among the populations in the world that are the most vulnerable to climatic change. In response to severe land degradation, 11 countries of the Sahel agreed to work together to address the policy, investment, and institutional barriers to establishing a land-restoration program that addresses climate change and land degradation. The program is called the Pan-Africa Initiative for the Great Green Wall (GGW). The initiative aims at helping to halt desertification and land degradation in the Sahelian zone, improving the lives and livelihoods of smallholder farmers and pastoralists in the area and helping its populations to develop effective adaptation strategies and responses through the use of tree-based development programs. To make the GGW initiative successful, member countries have established a coordinated and integrated effort from the government level to local scales and engaged with many stakeholders. Planning, decision-making, and actions on the ground is guided by participation and engagement, informed by policy-relevant knowledge to address the set of scalable land-restoration practices, and address drivers of land use change in various human-environmental contexts. In many countries, activities specific to achieving the GGW objectives have been initiated in the last five years.

In the past 50 years, human activities and climatic variability have caused major environmental changes in the semi-arid Sahelian zone and desertification/degradation of arable lands is of major concern for livelihoods and food security. In the wake of the Sahel droughts in the early 1970s and 1980s, the UN focused on the problem of desertification by organizing the UN Conference on Desertification (UNCOD) in Nairobi in 1976. This fuelled a significant increase in the often alarmist popular accounts of desertification as well as scientific efforts in providing an understanding of the mechanisms involved. The global interest in the subject led to the nomination of desertification as focal point for one of three international environmental conventions: the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), emerging from the Rio conference in 1992. This implied that substantial efforts were made to quantify the extent of desertification and to understand its causes. Desertification is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon aggravating poverty that can be seen as both a cause and a consequence of land resource depletion. As reflected in its definition adopted by the UNCCD, desertification is “land degradation in arid, semi-arid[,] and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including climate variation and human activities” (UN, 1992). While desertification was seen as a phenomenon of relevance to drylands globally, the Sahel-Sudan region remained a region of specific interest and a significant amount of scientific efforts have been invested to provide an empirically supported understanding of both climatic and anthropogenic factors involved. Despite decades of intensive research on human–environmental systems in the Sahel, there is no overall consensus about the severity of desertification and the scientific literature is characterized by a range of conflicting observations and interpretations of the environmental conditions in the region. Earth Observation (EO) studies generally show a positive trend in rainfall and vegetation greenness over the last decades for the majority of the Sahel and this has been interpreted as an increase in biomass and contradicts narratives of a vicious cycle of widespread degradation caused by human overuse and climate change. Even though an increase in vegetation greenness, as observed from EO data, can be confirmed by ground observations, long-term assessments of biodiversity at finer spatial scales highlight a negative trend in species diversity in several studies and overall it remains unclear if the observed positive trends provide an environmental improvement with positive effects on people’s livelihood.

The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is the largest and highest plateau on Earth. Due to its elevation, it receives much more downward shortwave radiation than other areas, which results in very strong diurnal and seasonal changes of the surface energy components and other meteorological variables, such as surface temperature and the convective atmospheric boundary layer. With such unique land process conditions on a distinct geomorphic unit, the TP has been identified as having the strongest land/atmosphere interactions in the mid-latitudes.Three major TP land/atmosphere interaction issues are presented in this article: (1) Scientists have long been aware of the role of the TP in atmospheric circulation. The view that the TP’s thermal and dynamic forcing drives the Asian monsoon has been prevalent in the literature for decades. In addition to the TP’s topographic effect, diagnostic and modeling studies have shown that the TP provides a huge, elevated heat source to the middle troposphere, and that the sensible heat pump plays a major role in the regional climate and in the formation of the Asian monsoon. Recent modeling studies, however, suggest that the south and west slopes of the Himalayas produce a strong monsoon by insulating warm and moist tropical air from the cold and dry extratropics, so the TP heat source cannot be considered as a factor for driving the Indian monsoon. The climate models’ shortcomings have been speculated to cause the discrepancies/controversies in the modeling results in this aspect. (2) The TP snow cover and Asian monsoon relationship is considered as another hot topic in TP land/atmosphere interaction studies and was proposed as early as 1884. Using ground measurements and remote sensing data available since the 1970s, a number of studies have confirmed the empirical relationship between TP snow cover and the Asian monsoon, albeit sometimes with different signs. Sensitivity studies using numerical modeling have also demonstrated the effects of snow on the monsoon but were normally tested with specified extreme snow cover conditions. There are also controversies regarding the possible mechanisms through which snow affects the monsoon. Currently, snow is no longer a factor in the statistic prediction model for the Indian monsoon prediction in the Indian Meteorological Department. These controversial issues indicate the necessity of having measurements that are more comprehensive over the TP to better understand the nature of the TP land/atmosphere interactions and evaluate the model-produced results. (3) The TP is one of the major areas in China greatly affected by land degradation due to both natural processes and anthropogenic activities. Preliminary modeling studies have been conducted to assess its possible impact on climate and regional hydrology. Assessments using global and regional models with more realistic TP land degradation data are imperative.Due to high elevation and harsh climate conditions, measurements over the TP used to be sparse. Fortunately, since the 1990s, state-of-the-art observational long-term station networks in the TP and neighboring regions have been established. Four large field experiments since 1996, among many observational activities, are presented in this article. These experiments should greatly help further research on TP land/atmosphere interactions.