essay on future environment

Life in 2050: What Will the Environment Look Like Where You Live in 20 Years?

The world will be a very different place by 2050, as environmental problems become an existential threat to civilization as we know it..

Matthew S. Williams

Welcome to the final installment in the “Life in 2050” series! Our previous installments examined what life will look like from different vantage points –  warfare , economics , education , everyday living , space exploration (in two installments ), transportation , and medicine . Today, we conclude things by taking a look at the impact climate change will have by mid-century.

As noted a few times in this series, climate change is (and will continue to be) one of the main drivers of change in this century (the other being the accelerating pace of technological change). And when it comes to changes in our climate, the resulting impact will be significant, far-reaching, and will come in many forms.

These include environmental crises and natural disasters and the geopolitical, economic, health, and humanitarian crises that will result. Our attempts to address any one of these problems have the potential to exacerbate one or more of the others. Ultimately, this raises some very serious questions.

For starters, just how bad will things get by 2050 ? Second, how will we deal with the problems that are anticipated? And lastly, is there a chance things will get better after 2050, or are they expected to keep getting worse? Interestingly enough, the answer to this last question depends on how we deal with the first two.

Things will get worse

Between now and 2050, we will continue to see an increase in the environmental and climate-related hazards that are a major concern today. These hazards are innumerable but can be broken down into five broad categories:

• Increased drought and wildfires
• Increased flooding and extreme weather
• Icecap melting and rising sea levels
• Collapsing agriculture and fisheries
• Pandemics and increased spread of disease
• Ecosystem disruption and species extinction

No matter what, these issues are all predicted to become worse between now and 2050. The only question is, will things get better after they become worse? The difference between the two comes down to our efforts as a species to address our habits and dependencies. As the research shows, the overall impact on our environment depends entirely on our ability to curb carbon emissions.

For this reason, international environmental summits have set baseline goals for emission reductions. Previously, the signatories of the Kyoto Protocols had identified atmospheric CO 2 concentrations of 400 to 450 parts per million (ppm) as a limit. The theory is that, if we can keep CO 2 levels below this baseline, we could mitigate the environmental changes that will result.

To illustrate, the last time that atmospheric CO 2 levels were as high as they are today was during the Pleiocene Era (ca. 3 million years ago). At this time, average global temperatures were 3.6 to 5.4 °F (2 to 3 °C) higher than they were during the pre-industrial era (prior to 1750 to the present), and sea levels were 50 to 80 feet (15 to 25 meters) higher than they are today.

Unfortunately, as of April of 2015 , the NOAA announced that atmospheric levels of CO 2 reached 400 ppm and were still climbing. As of February of 2021, they have reached 415 ppm, and the upward trend will continue. This essentially means that even if we abandoned fossil fuels entirely today, the resulting effects of climate change will still be felt for decades (even centuries) to come.

At this point, it’s clear that CO 2 levels will not level off anytime soon, and that establishing new goals is the best we can do. The only question is, just how much will we be able to curb our emissions? If we can keep them, and the resulting atmospheric CO 2 within a certain threshold, things will get better after they’ve gotten worse. If we don’t, things will continue to get worse.

Because of this, scientific agencies engaged in climate and Earth science – NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), and others – have created climate models that offer different predictive scenarios based on how high CO 2 levels will reach.

Hotter days lie ahead!

According to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), average global temperatures will rise between 2.7 to 3.6 º F ( 1.5 ºC to 2 ºC). As before, these figures are entirely dependent on our ability to curb carbon emissions. The former is based on accumulated atmospheric levels of 430 to 480 gigatons of CO 2 (GtCO 2 ), where the latter is based on levels of 480 to 530.

While this may not sound like a big increase, it’s important to note that this represents a global average, accounting for seasonal and regional variations. It should also be noted that the first scenario represents a 50% reduction in annual CO 2 emissions (compared to 2010 levels), whereas the latter reflects no change at all.

At the Earth’s mid-latitudes, the hottest days will be up to 5.4ºF (3ºC) hotter in the first scenario, while an increase of up to 7.2ºF (4ºC) will occur in the second scenario. At higher latitudes, the coldest nights will warm by 8.1 to 10.8°F (4.5 to 6°C) while in the Arctic, temperatures will become warmer by 9.9 to 14.4°F (5.5 to 8°C) and cold spells will be shorter.

This will mean that less ice will be retained by the polar ice caps every passing winter, which in turn will mean increased absorption of solar radiation come summer. It is also estimated that 14% of Earth’s population will be exposed to severe heat waves at least once every five years in the first scenario. That number jumps to 37% and near-annual heatwaves in the second.

Densely-populated regions will be especially hard hit, and up to 350 million more people in megacities will suffer from the resulting heat stress by 2050. Similarly, these temperature increases will lead to severe drought in many parts of the world, which will drastically impact agriculture and increased water stress in urban areas.

South Asia will be in particular danger since  four of the  most heavily populated cities will be located there by 2050. These include Mumbai (42.4 million; first place), Delhi (36 million; second place), and Kolkatta (33 million; fifth place) in India, and Dhaka (35.2 million; third place), and Karachi (31.7 million; in eighth place) in neighboring Bangladesh and Pakistan (respectively).

Those areas that will be particularly hard hit include the Mediterranean (Southern Europe, Northern Africa, and West Asia), Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Australia.  While the resulting death toll is difficult to predict, recent heatwaves and the resulting deaths indicate that it won’t be pretty.

In West Asia and the Middle East, increased temperatures of between 5.4 and 7.2ºF (3 and 4ºC) will greatly exacerbate the problem of droughts and severe heatwaves . In this region, considerable stress is already placed on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which originate in the mountains of eastern Turkey and pass through Syria and Iraq before entering into the Euphrates.

In the summer of 2019, heatwaves in June and July were responsible for the deaths of close to 1500 people in France , 400 in the Netherlands , and 900 “extra deaths” in the UK . Similarly, in 2015, India experienced one of its most intense heatwaves in recent years, which caused more than 2,500 deaths between May and June .

Once again, these highlighted scenarios represent the difference between a 50% reduction in emissions vs. “business as usual.” If CO 2 emissions exceed the 2010 baseline, the situation will become far worse. According to the AR5, emissions of 580 – 720 Gt will result in an increase of 3.6 to 5.4°F (2 and 3°C) while levels of 720 – 1000 Gt will mean an increase of 6.3°F (3.5°C) or more.

While temperature increases within the two highlighted scenarios will have significant implications, they will potentially be sustainable in the long run. If average temperatures increase further, life will become untenable for many regions on the planet, with the potential to displace tens of millions.

Rising sea levels

Another major threat associated with climate change is the prospect that temperature increases will result in the loss, or severe shrinking, of the polar ice caps. This will result in rising sea levels around the world, threatening coastal cities, as well as inland regions wherever major waterways are connected to the world’s oceans.

This trend is already happening, and the consequences are being felt all across the world. According to a recent study by the  NASA Goddard Space Flight Center , sea levels have been rising at an average rate of 3.4 mm/year between January 15 th , 1993, and March 11 th , 2021. The same data indicates that since 1900, global sea levels have risen by an average of 20 cm in total.

According to the IPCC  Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (issued in 2019), by 2050 global sea levels (GSL) are expected to be 9.44 to 15 inches ( 24 to 38 cm) higher on average. However, more recent NOAA estimates have incorporated new findings on ice sheet dynamics from Greenland and Iceland.

These ice samples indicate that average increases in GSLs have been accelerating over time and that this could mean an average increase of 1 to 3 ft (0.3 to 0.9 m) by 2050. During storm surges, coastal waters will be pushed further inland, leading to drastically increased instances of “nuisance flooding.”

Again, this represents an average increase and will vary depending on the region, thermal expansion, changing winds, air-sea heat, freshwater fluxes, atmospheric pressure, and the addition of melting ice into the ocean. These factors will alter ocean circulation and weather patterns, which will disrupt fisheries and threaten coastal and low-lying regions.

Again, urban centers will be especially hard hit, mainly because many people live close to the world’s oceans. According to a 2017 report by the UN Ocean Conference , more than 10% of the world’s population lives in coastal areas that are less than 33 ft (10 m) above sea level. Meanwhile, about 40% of the world’s population lives within 60 mi (100 km) of the coast.

This works out to about 37% of the global population living within “coastal communities,” where access to the sea and marine resources is vital to the lives and livelihood of the local population. According to projections issued by the Climate Center in 2019 , annual flooding and sea-level rise will mean land occupied by more than 300 million people will be underwater.

Increased spread of disease

Another major consideration presented by the IPCC AR5 is how changing temperatures will result in increased levels of disease . As it states :

“Throughout the 21st century, climate change is expected to lead to increases in ill-health in many regions and especially in developing countries with low income, as compared to a baseline without climate change… Risks from vector-borne diseases are projected to generally increase with warming, due to the extension of the infection area and season, despite reductions in some areas that become too hot for disease vectors.”

The major drivers of this trend will include increased temperatures, flooding, urbanization, and the movement of human populations around the world. This will lead to increases in food- and water-borne diseases, especially those spread by pests like fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes .

In fact, by 2050, it is estimated that half the world’s population could be at risk of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria , dengue fever, and the Zika virus. As a result, infectious diseases are projected to surpass heart disease as the world’s number one cause of death, creating a healthcare crisis that would cost at least $100 trillion in the process .

Increased levels of air pollution, ground-level ozone, and airborne allergens will also lead to higher rates of c hronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and other respiratory illnesses. Combined with other disease vectors, this will put a significant strain on health care systems , especially in urban centers in the least developed countries.

Species extinction

Another major warning contained in the AR5 is how climate change will impact biodiversity and lead to increased rates of species extinction due to drought, forest fires, and the spread of invasive species. Once again, the report found that the potential impact varied considerably between temperature increases of 2.7 and 3.6º F ( 1.5ºC to 2ºC).

The report studied 105,000 species of insects, plants, and vertebrates and determined that in both scenarios, there would be a significant impact on their populations. In the former scenario, 6% of insects, 8% of plants, and 4% of vertebrates were projected to lose over half of their geographic range. In the latter, those numbers rose to 18% of insects, 16% of plants, and 8% of vertebrates.

The consequences of this would be considerable. For insects, the loss of range would mean a loss of pollinators, such as bees , hoverflies, and blowflies, which are essential to the life cycle of countless species of plants (and agriculture). In polar regions, the increased loss of habitat could lead to the extinction of species such as penguins and polar bears .

In ocean basins , sharks , many species of fish, rays , and phytoplankton are becoming increasingly threatened as temperature changes  and altered ecosystems force migrations poleward and/or to deeper, cooler waters. Increased temperatures are also leading to bleaching and habitat loss in warm-water coral reefs.

Once again, the extent of this depends on which scenario comes true. In the first, about 7% of land areas are projected to see their ecosystems shift from one type of biome to another, which increases to 13% in the second. The warming trends will also lead to a reduction of rainforest biomass, increased deforestation, and the loss of the southern boundaries in boreal forests.

Sinking cities

The population of Africa is expected to increase by 83% and reach 2.5 billion by 2050, which will be driven largely by urban growth, which itself will increase threefold by 2050. The largest population centers are expected to include Kinshasha, Lagos, Cairo, Khartoum, and Dar es Salaam, with populations ranging from 35 million (Kinshasha) to slightly less than 16 million (Dar es Salaam).

Every one of these cities is located on a major river and/or coastal region, which means flooding will also be a major concern. As a result of rising sea levels and extreme weather, these cities risk increased flooding, the displacement of their residents, and (in some cases) may even need to be abandoned.

Consider the Nile Delta, where the majority of Egypt’s heavy industry and population are currently located. By 2050, much of the Delta will be submerged, meaning that cities like Alexandria will be underwater, while Cairo will see heavy flooding. In part to address this, Egypt plans to move its seat of government to the New Administrative Capital located 28 miles (45 km) to the east.

On top of that, many cities in low-lying areas are expected to be completely flooded or submerged by 2050. These include Basra , southern Iraq, and the coastlines of southern Pakistan and north-east India – ironically, as severe drought will be taking place further in the interior. Farther east, Kolkata and much of southern Bangladesh will also experience flooding and/or be submerged.

The coastal city of Mumbai , India’s financial capital and one of the largest cities in the world, also faces severe flooding and could even be wiped out by rising tides. The city’s historic downtown core and all the densely populated areas built on the series of islands that make up the region have been identified as being at risk. 

In Southeast Asia, at least two major capitals may have to be abandoned because of rising sea levels and flooding. These include Bangkok and Jakarta , the capitals of Thailand and Indonesia, respectively. Similarly, the Mekong Delta could be underwater as well, not to mention Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and parts of the northern capital of Hanoi.

In addition, the capital city of Manila is anticipated to become the 12th most populous city in the world, with a population of over 23.5 million . However, recent studies have also indicated that the Metro Manila region (and many other places in the Philippines) could effectively be submerged by then , forcing the evacuation of tens of millions.

In China, floodwaters and rising tides threaten to consume the very heart of Shanghai , one of Asia’s most important economic hubs, and many other cities around it. Then there’s the Pearl River Delta , a major economic hub in southern China that includes Guangzhou, Shenzen, Hong Kong, Macau, and others.

This region is currently home to more than 78 million people and will also experience significant flooding by 2050. In North America, cities like New Orleans are expected to be submerged by 2050, despite its extensive system of levees. The southern tip of the Everglades in Florida will also be underwater this time, as well as much of the Mexican state of Tabasco and the Mayan Riveria in southern Mexico.

Further north, flooding will also devastate much of southern Philadelphia, Hoboken, Newark, Jersey City , and Long Island’s southern coast . In the west, Canada’s city of Vancouver (which sits on the Fraser River Delta) will be largely underwater, as will towns along the coast just north of Seattle and parts of San Francisco .

Up to the challenge?

Dealing with the range of changes that will result from climate change will be no easy task. All across the globe, new pandemics, extreme weather , mass migrations, conflict, and natural disasters will stress disaster relief, healthcare, and governments to their breaking point. If not properly addressed, the death toll is expected to reach a few hundred million or more.

In short, the world will be torn between two extremes: heavy rains, floods, and surging tides on the one side, and drought, wildfires, and disease on the other. Given that some parts of the world will be hit harder than others, these hazards will trigger mass migrations, which will lead to humanitarian crises.

With their resources stressed to the breaking point – particularly food, water, and medicine – the least-impacted nations of the world will only be willing or able to do so much. In fact, increased shortages at home are likely to lead to isolationist and xenophobic governments whose solution to the crisis is to close the door and throw up barriers.

These problems are already apparent in the world today and will pick up speed as time goes on. Luckily for all of us, the solutions are also already here, and their development and adoption will speed up as 2050 draws nearer. For starters, desalination technology has come a long way, specifically as a means of addressing future water shortages.

There are also countless technologies designed to reduce water use, recycle greywater, and eliminate waste. Big data and machine learning are also being used to address the various symptoms of climate change by ensuring better monitoring, disaster response, and prevention.

Urban planning and architectural design are also evolving to emphasize sustainability and potentially turn megacities into hubs of green innovation. There are also many ways to mitigate flooding, ranging from large-scale engineering projects to small-scale, individualized solutions .

As Shanghai is China’s largest city and economic hub, that country is anticipated to do whatever it takes to keep the city “ unsinkable .” Many other cities are doing the same in preparation, from building up coastlines to constructing levees. And there are countless ways humans can reduce their carbon footprint and the amount of waste they generate.

One of them is to adopt alternative energy and fuels, which is becoming easier thanks to lower costs and greater efficiency. By 2050, renewables are projected to provide 49% of global electricity , followed by natural gas (23%), coal (23%), and nuclear (5%). As climate change continues to become more pressing, adoption efforts and production will increase further.

In addition to reducing our emissions, there are also strategies for reducing the amount of CO 2 already in our atmosphere. These take the form of carbon capture technology, genetically engineered trees , artificial trees, smog-eating surfaces, carbon upcycling , and geological engineering (aka. geoengineering).

As the saying goes, “every problem has a solution.” However, in many cases, every potential solution has a window of opportunity on it. Miss that window and the problem will continue to get worse and require more drastic measures. If humanity can significantly reduce its carbon footprint between now and 2050, we can expect that the changes in our climate will be sustainable.

If we cannot, then we can look forward to some rather severe outcomes. Coupled with all of the changes that will result from our rapidly-changing technological base, we can reasonably expect that the world of 2050 will be very different than it is today. In fact, you could say it would be enough to frighten and astound anyone alive today!

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In any case, 2050 will come around on its own, and being morose about how bad things could get is not an effective way to cope with change. What matters is what we do in the here and now and that we take the prospect of those changes seriously. After all, if we do our jobs right, things may still get worse before they get better. But ultimately, they will get better!

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ABOUT THE EDITOR

Matthew S. Williams Matthew S Williams is an author, a writer for Universe Today, and the curator of their Guide to Space section. His works include sci-fi/mystery The Cronian Incident and his articles have been featured in Phys.org, HeroX, Popular Mechanics, Business Insider, Gizmodo, and IO9, ScienceAlert, Knowridge Science Report, and Real Clear Science, with topics ranging from astronomy and Earth sciences to technological innovation and environmental issues. He is also a former educator and a 5th degree Black Belt Tae Kwon Do instructor. He lives on Vancouver Island with his wife and family.  

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Making Our Choice

I often get asked if the world is getting better, or is it getting worse my answer is simple: which one do you want so, go, choose the future you want, and work for it. that’s what our ancestors did, and we can too..

Dr. Jonathan Foley

GlobalEcoGuy.org

T ake a moment. Close your eyes. Think about the people in your life — your family and loved ones, your classmates, your neighbors, your friends and co-workers. Now think about some of the other people you have known over the years, from the lost loves, deceased relatives, trusted mentors, and complete strangers who affected the course of your life.

Guess what? They all have something in common.

Whether they’re young or old, rich or poor, conservative or liberal, from small towns or big cities, or from the different ethnicities, beliefs, genders, and orientations that make up our diverse society, they all want a better future for their children. So do you. So do I. So did our parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. In fact, we all share that fundamental, human desire: We want our children and the generation that comes after us to be happy, healthy, safe, and secure. That instinct is baked inside of us. It’s part of what makes us human.

B ut for our children to truly thrive, we must stop damaging the planet we live on, the world that nourishes us, protects us, and sustains our lives. We need to protect the environmental systems we all depend on — to provide clean air, clean water, safe food, a safe climate, and so many other essentials.

We need to protect and sustain the planet, because it protects and sustains us.

The alternative is simply unthinkable. If we end up critically damaging Earth’s environment, we will leave future generations with a radically altered climate, broken ecosystems, and vanishing natural resources. It would be a dangerous world, difficult to thrive in. Environmental disasters would become the norm, dominating the human condition for generations — all because we didn’t act wisely today.

And no one wants this. No matter one’s political leanings, income level, ethnicity, or upbringing, no one wants to leave a wrecked planet — a world that is depleted, damaged, and dangerous — to their children. None of us want to be the first people in history to knowingly imperil their children’s future.

But that’s exactly what we’re doing, even if we’re not willing to admit it. However, we know, deep in our gut, that we need to do better. We know that we need to act, quickly and boldly, and turn things around.

But, instead, we delay. We indulge in self-denial. And, day by day, year by year, we let things get worse.

U nfortunately, after decades of these delays, we can’t wait any more. There is no time left to waste.

The Earth’s environment is already starting to experience irreversible damage — to its climate, to its biological diversity and ecosystems, and to its natural resources — and much more is coming soon if we don’t quickly change our ways. In fact, the long-term fate of Earth’s key environmental systems will be largely determined by the actions we take, or don’t take, during the coming years.

In other words, it will happen on our watch.

Whether we like it or not, we now stand at a critical juncture in human history. We didn’t choose this, of course. We didn’t sign up for it. We didn’t ask to be here. But we have inherited one of the most important moments in all of human history.

So, what are we going to do with it?

What we do will decide the future of our planet, our civilization, and our species for millennia to come. What we do will determine whether we profoundly change Earth’s climate for thousands of years, or not. What we do will determine how much sea levels will rise, and which cities will vanish under rising tides. What we do will determine which species, and which ecosystems, will survive into the future. What we do will determine whether we have sufficient natural resources — including the crops and soils, forests and fisheries, clean air and freshwater we all depend on. What we do will ultimately determine who thrives, and who dies, on a rapidly changing planet.

Perhaps no other moment in human existence has been as crucial as this one. The destiny of our planet and our civilization now rests on our shoulders.

So, like it or not, it’s up to us.

B ut don’t despair.

While some people may see this as a terrifying prospect, I find it energizing and inspiring. We — yes, people like you and me! — can shape the future and put it on a better, more sustainable path.

But it won’t be easy. First of all, we will need to completely rethink the way we use and produce food, water, and energy. Our current systems are inherently unsustainable, and will devastate the environment if they remain in place much longer. We will also need to rethink our homes and cities, our methods of transportation, and the way we use and discard materials. We will need to rethink the relationship between our society and the physical and biological realities of this planet. We will need to rethink everything.

Scratch that. We don’t need to rethink everything, we get to! It’s an opportunity , not a sacrifice.

Remember, the systems we must change are fundamentally broken. They simply don’t work, at least not in the long run. So we have the amazing opportunity to reinvent them, and through creativity, innovation, and hard work, we can make them far better.

Far from being a time of misery and sacrifice, this is an unparalleled chance to do things right. We can find smarter ways, better ways, to support our economy and ourselves, without wrecking the planet and compromising the lives of people in the future.

Building this better world and this better future — one that is healthy, safe, and secure for the long term — is going to be the biggest opportunity any generation has ever seen.

I honestly believe — no, I know — that we can seize this moment and build a better world. We have the knowledge, the tools, and the ability to do most of it right now. We can change course, today, and with some luck and hard work, we can build a thriving world for future generations.

There’s really nothing stopping us.

So why aren’t we? What’s keeping us from building a better future right now?

It’s simple: We haven’t decided to.

We have yet to make our choice as a society, as a civilization, as a people. We haven’t stepped up to the plate. We haven’t placed our bet, and rolled the hard six. But now it’s time.

B asically, it comes down to this: We have to choose between two versions of ourselves.

Are going to be the people we have been? Selfish. Greedy. Fearful. Divided. More concerned with trivial issues than solving real problems.

Or are we going to be the people we could be? People like our parents and grandparents — people who were courageous and selfless, who defeated fascism, raced to the moon, cured diseases, fought for moral causes, and gave us a better world?

Are we going to accept the world as it is? A world divided by fear and hate. A world that ignores science and truth when it’s uncomfortable. A world that doesn’t care about the future. A world more concerned with getting rich quick, from instant fame or easy bitcoins, rather than meaningful work that contributes to society.

Or are we going to build the world that should be? A world where we set aside our greed and petty differences and are kind, generous, and just with each other. A world where we listen to science, and act on what we know to be true. A world where we are guided by ethics and a strong moral compass. A world where we leave our children a better future, just as our ancestors did for us. A world that we can be proud of.

That’s our choice.

The choice we make will not only define who we are, in this crucial moment in history, but it will also define the fate of our planet and the countless generations that come after us.

F ortunately, that choice is still up to us. It hasn’t yet slipped from our fingers. We still have a little — not much! — time left to make it, if we don’t squander it completely by delaying too long.

So, what’s it going to be? Will we be a noble people, or a shallow one? Will we build a good future, or a bad one? That’s up to you. And me. And all of us.

We will need to look deep within ourselves, and at the society and systems around us, and make our choice.

I just hope that all we make an thoughtful choice. I hope it is guided equally by our heart and our head. I hope we have a clear moral vision of the world we want to build, and develop the knowledge and wisdom we need to build it in a safe, secure, and sustainable way.

In making this choice, we must be guided by ethics — to know what we should do — and by science — to know what is actually possible . Together, ethics and science can guide us to a just and sustainable future, which we can proudly hand to our descendants.

No matter what, the future will be determined by the choice we make.

I wonder: Will we make a good one?

Note: Parts of this essay were adapted from an earlier piece called “What’s Limiting Us”, which was also published on my blog.

Dr. Jonathan Foley (@ GlobalEcoGuy ) is a climate & environmental scientist, writer, and speaker. He is also the Executive Director of Project Drawdown , the world’s leading resource for climate solutions.

These views are his own.

Copyright © 2015–2020, Jonathan Foley. All rights reserved.

Written by Dr. Jonathan Foley

Executive Director, Project Drawdown. Climate & environmental scientist, working on solutions. Personal views.

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Perspectives

The Science of Sustainability

Can a unified path for development and conservation lead to a better future?

October 13, 2018

• A False Choice
• Two Paths to 2050
• What's Possible
• The Way Forward
• Engage With Us

The Cerrado may not have the same name recognition as the Amazon , but this vast tropical savannah in Brazil has much in common with that perhaps better-known destination. The Cerrado is also a global biodiversity hotspot, home to thousands of species only found there, and it is also a critical area in the fight against climate change, acting as a large carbon pool.

But Brazil is one of the two largest soy producers in the world—the crop is one of the country’s most important commodities and a staple in global food supplies—and that success is placing the Cerrado in precarious decline. To date, around 46% of the Cerrado has been deforested or converted for agriculture.

Producing more soy doesn’t have to mean converting more native habitat, however. A new spatial data tool is helping identify the best places to expand soy without further encroachment on the native landscapes of the Cerrado. And with traders and bankers working together to offer preferable financing to farmers who expand onto already-converted land, Brazil can continue to produce this important crop, while protecting native habitat and providing more financial stability for farmers.

The Cerrado is just one region of a vast planet, of course, but these recent efforts to protect it are representative of a new way of thinking about the relationship between conservation and our growing human demands. It is part of an emerging model for cross-sector collaboration that aims to create a world prepared for the sustainability challenges ahead.

Is this world possible? Here, we present a new science-based view that says “Yes”—but it will require new forms of collaboration across traditionally disconnected sectors, and on a near unprecedented scale.

Download a PDF version of this feature. Click to see translated versions of this page.

I.  A False Choice

Many assume that economic interests and environmental interests are in conflict. But new research makes the case that this perception of development vs. conservation is not just unnecessary but actively counterproductive to both ends. Achieving a sustainable future will be dependent on our ability to secure both thriving human communities and abundant and healthy natural ecosystems.

The Nature Conservancy partnered with the University of Minnesota and 11 other organizations to ask whether it is possible to achieve a future where the needs of both people and nature are advanced. Can we actually meet people’s needs for food, water and energy while doing more to protect nature? 

The perception of development vs. conservation is not just unnecessary, but actively counterproductive to both ends.

To answer this question, we compared what the world will look like in 2050 if economic and human development progress in a “business-as-usual” fashion and what it would look like if instead we join forces to implement a “sustainable” path with a series of fair-minded and technologically viable solutions to the challenges that lie ahead.

In both options, we used leading projections of population growth and gross domestic product to estimate how demand for food, energy and water will evolve between 2010 and 2050. Under business-as-usual, we played out existing expectations and trends in how those changes will impact land use, water use, air quality, climate, protected habitat areas and ocean fisheries. In the more sustainable scenario, we proposed changes to how and where food and energy are produced, asking if these adjustments could result in better outcomes for the same elements of human well-being and nature. Our full findings are described in a peer-reviewed paper— “An Attainable Global Vision for Conservation and Human Well-Being” —published in  Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment .

These scenarios let us ask, can we do better? Can we design a future that meets people’s needs without further degrading nature in the process?

Our answer is “yes,” but it comes with several big “ifs.” There is a path to get there, but matters are urgent—if we want to accomplish these goals by mid-century, we’ll have to dramatically ramp up our efforts now. The next decade is critical.

Furthermore, changing course in the next ten years will require global collaboration on a scale not seen perhaps since World War II. The widely held impression that economic and environmental goals are mutually exclusive has contributed to a lack of connection among key societal constituencies best equipped to solve interconnected problems—namely, the public health, development, financial and conservation communities. This has to change.

The good news is that protecting nature and providing water, food and energy to a growing world do not have to be either-or propositions. Our view, instead, calls for smart energy, water, air, health and ecosystem initiatives that balance the needs of economic growth and resource conservation equally. Rather than a zero-sum game, these elements are balanced sides of an equation, revealing the path to a future where people and nature thrive together.

II. Two Paths to 2050

This vision is not a wholesale departure from what others have offered. A number of prominent scientists and organizations have put forward important and thoughtful views for a sustainable future; but often such plans consider the needs of people and nature in isolation from one another, use analyses confined to limited sectors or geographies, or assume that some hard tradeoffs must be made, such as slowing global population growth, taking a reduction in GDP growth or shifting diets off of meat. Our new research considers global economic development and conservation needs together, more holistically, in order to find a sustainable path forward.

What could a different future look like? We’ve used as our standard the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 measures for “a world where all people are fed, healthy, employed, educated, empowered and thriving, but not at the expense of other life on Earth.” Our analysis directly aligns with ten of those goals. Using the SDGs as our guideposts, we imagine a world in 2050 that looks very different than the one today—and drastically different from the one we will face if we continue in business-as-usual fashion.

A sustainable future is possible.

To create our assessment of business-as-usual versus a more sustainable path, we looked at 14 measurements including temperature change, carbon dioxide levels, air pollution, water consumption, food and energy footprints, and protected areas.

Over the next 30 years, we know we’ll face rapid population growth and greater pressures on our natural resources. The statistics are sobering—with 9.7 billion people on the planet by 2050, we can expect a 54 percent increase in global food demand and 56 percent increase in energy demand. While meetings these growing demands and achieving sustainability is possible, it is helpful to scrutinize where the status quo will get us.

The World Health Organization, World Economic Forum and other leading global development organizations now say that air pollution and water scarcity—environmental challenges—are among the biggest dangers to human health and prosperity. And our business-as-usual analysis makes clear what many already fear: that human development based on the same practices we use today will not prepare us for a world with nearly 10 billion people.

To put it simply, if we stay on today’s current path, we risk being trapped in an intensifying cycle of scarcity—our growth opportunities severely capped and our natural landscapes severely degraded. Under this business-as-usual scenario, we can expect global temperature to increase 3.2°C; worsened air pollution affecting 4.9 billion more people; overfishing of 84 percent of fish stocks; and greater water stress affecting 2.75 billion people. Habitat loss continues, leaving less than 50 percent of native grasslands and several types of forests intact.

However, if we make changes in where and how we meet food, water and energy demands for the same growing global population and wealth, the picture can look markedly different by mid-century. This “sustainability” path includes global temperature increase limited to 1.6°C—meeting Paris Climate Accord goals—zero overfishing with greater fisheries yields, a 90 percent drop in exposure to dangerous air pollution, and fewer water-stressed people, rivers and agricultural fields. These goals can be met while natural habitats extend both inside and outside protected areas. All signatory countries to the Aichi Targets meet habitat protection goals, and more than 50 percent of all ecoregions’ extents remain unconverted, except temperate grasslands (of which over 50 percent are already converted today).

Behind the Science

Discover how TNC and its partners developed the models for 2050.

III. What's Possible

Achieving this sustainable future for people and nature is possible with existing and expected technology and consumption, but only with major shifts in production patterns. Making these shifts will require overcoming substantial economic, social and political challenges. In short, it is not likely that the biophysical limits of the planet will determine our future, but rather our willingness to think and act differently by putting economic development and the environment on equal footing as central parts of the same equation.

Climate, Energy and Air Quality

Perhaps the most pressing need for change is in energy use. In order to both meet increased energy demand and keep the climate within safe boundaries, we’ll need to alter the way we produce energy, curtailing emissions of carbon and other harmful chemicals.

Under a business-as-usual scenario, fossil fuels will still claim a 76 percent share of total energy in 2050. A more sustainable approach would reduce that share to 13 percent by 2050. While this is a sharp change, it is necessary to stanch the flow of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The reduction in carbon-based energy could be offset by increasing the share of energy from renewable sources to 54 percent and increasing nuclear energy to one third of total energy output—delivering a total of almost 85 percent of the world’s energy demand from non-fossil-fuel sources.

Additionally, we will only achieve the full extent of reduced climate impacts if we draw down existing carbon from the atmosphere. This can be done through greater investment in carbon capture and storage efforts, including natural climate solutions—land management strategies such as avoiding forest loss, reforestation, investments in soil health and coastal ecosystem restoration.

The net benefit of these energy redistribution efforts is twofold. First, they lower the rate at which greenhouse gases are flowing into the air—taking atmospheric carbon projections down to 442 parts per million, compared to business-as-usual estimates that put the level closer to 520 ppm.

Second, these energy source shifts would create a marked decline in particulate air pollution. Our models show that the higher fossil fuel use in the business-as-usual scenario is likely to expose half the people on the planet to poorer air quality by 2050. Under the sustainable scenario, that figure drops to just 7 percent of the world’s inhabitants, thanks to lower particulate emissions from renewable and nuclear energy sources.

Case Studies: 

• Forests That Fight Climate Change: Brazil’s Serra da Mantiqueira region demonstrates how reforestation can tackle climate change, improve water supplies, and increase incomes in rural communities.  Learn More
• Can Trees Be a Prescription for Urban Health?:  Conservationists, community organizations and public health researchers joined forces to plant trees in Louisville, Kentucky and monitor their impact on air quality and residents’ health.  Learn More

Food, Habitat and City Growth

Meeting the sustainable targets we propose requires a second front on land to shift how we use available real estate and where we choose to conduct necessary activities. Overall, the changes we include in our more sustainable view allow the world to meet global food, water and energy demands with no additional conversion of natural habitat for those needs—an outcome that is not possible under business as usual.

While transitioning away from fossil fuels is essential to meet climate goals, new renewable energy infrastructure siting will present land-use challenges. Renewable energy production takes up space, and if not sited well it can cause its own negative impacts on nature and its services to people. In our more sustainable path, we address this challenge by preferencing the use of already converted land for renewables development, lessening the impact of new wind and solar on natural habitat. We also exclude expansion of biofuels, as they are known to require extensive land area to produce, causing conflicts with natural habitat and food security.

Perhaps most encouraging, we show that it is possible to meet future food demands on less agricultural land than is used today. Notably, our scenario keeps the mix of crops in each growing region the same, so as not to disrupt farmers’ cultures, technologies, capacity or existing crop knowledge. Instead, we propose moving which crops are grown where within growing regions, putting more “thirsty” crops in areas with more water, and matching the nutrient needs of various crops to the soils available.

Unlike some projections used by others, for this scenario we left diet expectations alone, matching meat consumption with business-as-usual expectations. If we were able to reduce meat consumption, especially by middle- and high-income countries where nutritional needs are met, reducing future agricultural land, water and pollution footprints would be even easier.

Meanwhile, on the land protection front, our analysis is guided by the Convention on Biological Diversity, the leading global platform most countries have signed. Each signatory country has agreed to protect up to 17 percent of each habitat type within its borders. While many countries will fall short of this goal under business as usual, it can be achieved in our more sustainable option.

By making changes in food, water and energy use, we can better protect nearly all habitat types.

We acknowledge 17 percent is an imperfect number, and many believe more natural habitat is needed to allow the world’s biodiversity to thrive. Looking beyond protected areas, we see additional differences in the possible futures we face. Our more sustainable option retains 577 million hectares more natural habitat than business as usual, much of it outside of protected areas. Conservation has long focused on representation—it is not only important to conserve large areas, but to represent different kinds of habitat. Under business as usual, we will lose more than half of several major habitat types by mid-century, including temperate broadleaf and mixed forests, Mediterranean forest, and temperate grassland. Flooded and tropical grasslands approach this level of loss as well.

But with the proposed shifts in food, water and energy use, we can do better for nearly all habitats in our more sustainable scenario. The one exception is temperate grasslands, a biome that has already lost more than 50 percent of its global extent today. In all, the more sustainable scenario shows a future that would be largely compatible with emerging views that suggest protecting half of the world’s land system.

 Case Study:

• Managing Sprawling Soy:  A partnership between businesses and nonprofit groups in Brazil will help farmers plant soy in the areas where it is has the smallest impact on natural habitats.  Learn More

Drinking Water, River Basins and Fisheries

Water presents a complex set of challenges. Like land, it is both a resource and a habitat. Fresh water resources are dwindling while ocean ecosystems are overburdened by unregulated fishing and pollution. Business-as-usual projections estimate that 2.75 billion people will experience water scarcity by 2050 and 770 water basins will experience water stress. Africa and Central Asia in particular would see fewer water stressed basins in the sustainable scenario.

Changes in energy sources and food production (see above sections) would lead to significant water savings by reducing use of water as a coolant in energy production and by moving crops to areas where they need less irrigation. Thanks to these changes, our more sustainable option for the future would relieve 104 million people and biodiversity in 25 major river basins from likely water stress.

Meanwhile, in the seas, we find an inspiring possibility for fisheries. Continuing business-as-usual fisheries management adds further stress to the oceans and the global food system as more stocks decline, further diminishing the food we rely on from the seas. But more sustainable fisheries management is possible, and our projections using a leading fisheries model shows that adopting sustainable management in all fisheries by mid-century would actually increase yield by over a quarter more than we saw in 2010.

And, while we know that aquaculture is a certain element of the future of fish and food, many questions remain about precisely how this industry will grow, and how it can be shaped to be a low-impact part of the global food system. Given these unknowns, we kept aquaculture growth the same in both our views of the future.

 Case Studies:

• Cities and Farmers Find Common Ground on Water: Smarter agricultural practices in the Kenya’s Upper Tana River Watershed are resulting in better yields for farmers and more reliable water supplies for the city of Nairobi.  Learn More
• Technology Offers a Lifeline for Fish:  A new mobile application being piloted in Indonesia is helping fill a crucial gap in fisheries management—providing accurate data about what species are being caught where.  Learn More

IV.  The Way Forward

This analysis does not represent a panacea for the growing need for economic development across the planet or for the environmental challenges that are ahead. But it does provide an optimistic viewpoint and an integrated picture that can serve as a starting point for discussion.

Our goal is to apply new questions—and ultimately new solutions—to our known problems. We present one of many possible paths to a different future, and we welcome like-minded partners and productive critics to share their perspectives with us. We encourage people from across society to join the conversation, to fill gaps where they exist, and to bring other important considerations to our attention. Most of all, we call on the development (e.g. energy, agriculture, infrastructure), health, and financial communities—among others—to work with us to find new ways of taking action together.

Ultimately, by illustrating a viable pathway to sustainability that serves both the needs of economic and environmental interests—goals that many have long assumed were mutually exclusive—we hope to inspire the global community to engage in the difficult but necessary social, economic and political dialogue that can make a sustainable future a reality.

Protecting nature and providing water, food and energy to the world can no longer be either-or propositions. Nature and human development are both central factors in the same equation. We have at our disposal the cross-sector expertise necessary to make informed decisions for the good of life on our planet, so let’s use it wisely. Our science affirms there is a way.

Join us as we chart a new path to 2050 by helping people and nature thrive—together.

Testimonials

Opportunities to Engage

Designing strategies to address global challenges for people and nature requires integration of diverse bodies of evidence that are now largely segregated. As actors across the health, development and environment sectors pivot to act collectively, they face challenges in finding and interpreting evidence on sector interrelationships, and thus in developing effective evidence-based responses.

Learn more about these emerging coalitions that offer opportunities to engage and connect with shared resources.

Bridge Collaborative

The Bridge Collaborative unites people and organizations in health, development and the environment with the evidence and tools to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. Learn More

Science for Nature and People Partnership

SNAPP envisions a world where protecting and promoting nature works in concert with sustainable development and improving human well-being. Learn More

Wicked Econ Fest

Wicked Econ Fests are workshops between leading economics, finance, conservation and policy experts to tackle specific, decision-driven challenges. Learn More

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Check out our latest thinking and real-world solutions to some of the most complex challenges facing people and the planet today. Explore our Insights

Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations

Students are often asked to write an essay on Save Environment for Future Generations in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations

Introduction.

The environment is our life giver. It provides air, water, and food, essential for our survival. However, it’s under threat due to human activities.

Why Save Environment?

Saving the environment is crucial for the survival of future generations. If we don’t act now, they might not have a healthy planet to live on.

We can save the environment by reducing waste, recycling, using renewable energy, and planting trees. Each small action counts towards a larger goal.

Let’s pledge to save our environment for future generations. It’s not just our responsibility, but also our necessity.

250 Words Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations

The imperative of environmental conservation, human activities and environmental degradation.

Human activities have significantly contributed to environmental degradation. Industrialization, deforestation, and excessive use of natural resources have led to climate change, loss of biodiversity, and pollution. These activities, if continued unchecked, could lead to irreparable damage, making the planet uninhabitable for future generations.

The Role of Sustainability

Sustainability is the key to preserving the environment for future generations. It entails the responsible use of resources, ensuring their availability for future generations. By adopting sustainable practices, we can mitigate the negative impacts of human activities on the environment.

Individual Responsibility and Collective Action

While systemic changes are crucial, individual responsibility also plays a significant role. Simple actions like reducing waste, recycling, and using renewable energy can make a difference. However, to bring about substantial change, collective action is necessary. Governments, corporations, and communities must work together to implement policies and practices that protect the environment.

In conclusion, saving the environment for future generations is not just a moral obligation but a necessity for our survival. By adopting sustainable practices and taking collective action, we can ensure that future generations inherit a healthy and thriving planet. It is high time we realise that our actions today will determine the future of our planet.

500 Words Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations

The environment is an integral part of our lives, providing the necessary resources for human survival, such as air, water, food, and shelter. However, human activities have led to environmental degradation, threatening the survival of future generations. It is, therefore, paramount to save the environment for future generations.

The Current State of the Environment

Implications for future generations.

If the current rate of environmental degradation continues, future generations will inherit a planet that is vastly different from the one we know today. They will face severe water and food shortages due to reduced agricultural output caused by climate change. They will also have to deal with the health effects of air and water pollution, including respiratory diseases and waterborne illnesses. Furthermore, they will lose the opportunity to enjoy the planet’s natural beauty and biodiversity due to habitat destruction.

Strategies for Environmental Conservation

To save the environment for future generations, it is essential to adopt sustainable practices. This includes reducing, reusing, and recycling resources to minimize waste. It also involves shifting from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Role of Technology

Technology can also play a crucial role in environmental conservation. For instance, advancements in clean energy technologies can help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Similarly, technology can help improve waste management, with innovations such as waste-to-energy conversion and biodegradable materials.

In conclusion, saving the environment for future generations is not just a moral obligation, but a survival necessity. It requires collective action from all sectors of society, from individuals to governments. By adopting sustainable practices, leveraging technology, and protecting our natural resources, we can ensure that future generations inherit a healthy and vibrant planet. It is a challenging task, but with concerted efforts, it is a goal within our reach.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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• EARTH DAY ISSUE

Why we’ll succeed in saving the planet from climate change

Life will be different—and warmer—in 2070. But we will find ways to limit carbon emissions, embrace nature, and thrive.

My mother’s brown hair is long and parted in the center. She is sewing a eucalyptus seedpod to a dress made of pale green drapery fabric, laughing with her friends. She is 19 years old.

It is February 1970, a few months before the first Earth Day, and students at San Jose State College in California are throwing a “Survival Faire,” during which they plan to bury a brand-new yellow Ford Maverick. The Maverick and all combustion engines are to be declared dead because they belch pollutants that have helped create vile, ground-hugging smog in San Jose and cities around the world. The Maverick, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery wrote, “was pushed through downtown San Jose in a parade led by three ministers, the college band and a group of comely coeds wearing green shroudlike gowns.”

My mother remembers those gowns well, 50 years later. The students that day were worried about dirty water and overpopulation as well as dirty air, but my mother was optimistic. “I assumed that human beings would step up when we had to,” she says. And to an extent we did : Cars in the United States are 99 percent cleaner than they were back then, thanks to pollution laws.

I didn’t inherit my mother’s brown hair or her sewing ability. At 41, I still take my clothes to her for repair. But I got her optimism—and these days we have new things to step up about.

After 15 years of reporting on the environment for scientific and popular publications and for a book on the future of conservation, I am still frequently overwhelmed by the web of problems that face us: climate change , dwindling populations of wild plants and animals, widespread environmental injustice. They’re all harder to fix than smog. But in the midst of a swirling sea of sorrow, anxiety, fury, and love for the beautiful weirdness of life on Earth, I find an iron determination to never, ever, give up.

What gives me hope? We already have the knowledge and technology we need to feed a larger population, provide energy for all, begin to reverse climate change, and prevent most extinctions. The public desire for action is bursting forth on the streets. Last September some six million people worldwide went on “ climate strike .” Just as in 1970, the electric crackle of cultural change is once again in the air. I believe we will build a good 2070.

It will not look like 2020 or 1970. We cannot undo what we’ve done; we cannot go back in time. Change—ecological, economic, social—is inevitable. Some of it will be tragic. We will lose things we love—species, places, relationships with the nonhuman world that have endured for millennia. Some change will be hard to predict. Ecosystems will reshuffle, species will evolve.

We will change too. Many of us will learn to see ourselves differently, as one species among many—a part of nature, not in opposition to it. I predict that we will look back at the late 20th and early 21st centuries as a painful, turbulent transition, during which humanity learned to thrive in positive ecological relationships with one another and with the species around us.

Our biggest shared challenge is climate change. If it seems overwhelming, it’s in part because we, as individuals, can’t stop it. Even if we’re perfect green consumers—refusing to fly, reusing shopping bags , going vegan—we’re trapped in a system that makes it impossible to stop adding to the problem. Living requires eating, getting to work, and staying warm enough in winter and cool enough in summer to work and sleep. For now, it’s impossible to do these things in most places without emitting carbon.

We cannot solve the climate crisis by being ‘good’ consumers. But we can make things much better by being good citizens.

But change can happen faster than many people appreciate. Cars replaced horses within 15 years in many places. For thousands of years we got along without plastic, and then in a few decades it was everywhere. Throughout history, we’ve been both ingenious inventors and quick to adopt new technologies. With popular will and the right policies, we’ll have no problem creating new energy and transportation infrastructures, goods made without toxins or carbon emissions, biodegradable plastic substitutes.

As individuals it’s much more effective to spend our energy demanding those policies, which will make going green the cheaper, easier path, than it is to buy the expensive, niche-market green options available today. Increasingly I am seeing people realize this, and that too gives me hope. We cannot solve the climate crisis by being “good” consumers. But we absolutely can make things much better by being good citizens.

A quarter of emissions come from electricity and heat generation. Happily, with the political will, these are also the easiest emissions to eliminate. “We could easily cut it in half in 10 years,” says Jonathan Foley, the executive director of Project Drawdown , which does cost-benefit analyses of climate change solutions. Wind and solar power are mature enough to deploy on a massive scale, and batteries to store the power—both centrally and house-to-house—are getting better and cheaper. Meanwhile, coal companies are going bankrupt.

Agriculture, forestry, and land use are trickier. They produce another quarter of our emissions—mostly nitrous oxide rising from manure or synthetic fertilizer, methane belched by livestock, and CO2 from burning fuel and fields. By 2070 there may be more than 10 billion of us to feed. How do we shrink the land and climate footprints of farming and still produce enough calories to go around?

One solution is to stop subsidizing meat production and to encourage society-wide shifts to more plant foods. Beef in particular takes the most land and water; to grow a pound of it, you have to feed the animal about six pounds of plants. Luckily there’s hope , in the form of tasty new meat alternatives such as the Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat. I don’t imagine everyone will be vegan in 2070. But most people will simply eat far less meat than they do today—and probably won’t miss it.

What about farms themselves? Environmentalists tend to fall into two camps. One camp says farming must intensify, using robots and GMOs and big data, so as to produce an astronomical amount of food on a tiny footprint. The other camp says farms must become more “natural,” mixing crops and reducing toxic chemicals while leaving the borders of fields as wildlife habitat. After years of reporting on this, I wonder: Why can’t we do both? We can have some urban “vertical farms” in skyscrapers running on renewable energy. We can also have large outdoor farms that are high yield and high-tech, friendly to wildlife and actively storing carbon in their soils. ( Read how one tiny country feeds the world. )

The rest of our carbon emissions come from industry, transportation, and buildings. These are the ones that keep Foley up at night. How will we retrofit billions of buildings, replacing gas and oil furnaces? How will we wrestle some 1.5 billion gas-guzzlers off the roads? We can’t count on hippie undergraduates to bury them all.

The only real option is for governments to drive the change with tax incentives and regulations. In Norway half of new cars registered are now electric, in large part because the government exempts them from sales tax, making them as cheap as gas-powered cars—the sale of which will be banned by 2025. In New York City the city council last spring adopted a law that will require large- and medium-size buildings to cut their carbon emissions by more than a quarter by 2030. Converting an entire country like the U.S. to efficient buildings, easy mass transit, and electric cars won’t be cheap—but let’s keep the expense in perspective. “The money we are talking about is not more than what we bailed out the banks with,” Foley says, referring to the federal response to the 2008 financial crisis.

We know how to do this: That’s the basic message of Project Drawdown. One of the most cost-effective solutions to climate change, Foley and his team say, is ensuring that girls and women have access to education and birth control. Women in Kenya, for example, went from having 8.1 children on average in the 1970s to just 3.7 children in 2015. When that decline was briefly interrupted in the 2000s, it was linked to an interruption of girls’ access to education. Empowering women will help stabilize the global population—and limit demand for food and energy. ( See the best and worst countries to be a woman. )

To tackle climate change, even as we turn global emissions down to near zero, we still will need to invest in methods to remove some greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Technologies to do this are promising but mostly in their infancy—except for trees, which in the short term at least are good at soaking up carbon. Trees have another advantage: They create forests, where lichen hangs and lizards doze, and monkeys holler back and forth while they gorge on wild figs. I’ve spent time in forests like that, and the dry word “biodiversity” can never convey their worth.

You may have heard that we are in the sixth mass extinction . This assertion is based on the elevated rate of extinction, not the total losses so far. Fewer than 900 documented extinctions have happened since the 1500s, which is absolutely too many, and likely a substantial undercount. But given that scientists have assessed more than 100,000 species so far, it is hardly yet a “mass” extinction, which paleontologists define as a period in which at least three-quarters of all species go extinct. If we keep these rates up for a few million years—or massively increase them by crossing some threshold of climate or habitat destruction—then we could find ourselves in a mass extinction. But we are not there yet, and if we don’t paralyze ourselves with despair, we can still change course.

New research suggests most species can be saved and wildlife restored to higher abundances with a combination of more parks and protected areas, restoration of some ecosystems, and a reduction in farmland. Agriculture currently uses a third of the Earth’s land. But if we cut meat eating and food waste in half, increase crop yields, and trade food more efficiently, the researchers estimate, we could grow all the food we need on less land. That would create more space for other species.

Naturalist E.O. Wilson and others have called for a “half Earth” approach, in which half the planet is reserved as wilderness where human activity is carefully limited. Big parks are wonderful, and necessary for some species, but the effort risks displacing a lot of people. “For sure, they are necessary, and we probably need 20 percent or more,” says Georgina Mace, a biodiversity expert at University College London (UCL). “We also have to have people living with and alongside and amongst wildlife.” In her vision of the future, people and other species share space nearly everywhere. “I’m a whole-Earth person, not a half-Earth person,” Mace says.

I believe such hybrid thinking will be the norm in 2070. Borders will be softer, backyards messier. Wilderness corridors will thread through farmlands and cities; floodplains will store carbon, produce food, and control floods. Kids will climb trees in schoolyard orchards to pick fruit.

Wild places will still exist, and people will still fall in love with them. But they might look very different than they do today. As species move in response to climate change, trying to prevent ecosystems from changing will become impossible and, in some places, counterproductive. Instead we’ll focus on making sure the planet retains most species with robust populations. The purist idea that all species can be sorted into “native” or “invasive” will be retired. It never made much sense anyway. Ecosystems are always in flux, and most have been influenced by humans for thousands of years.

Management won’t be hands-off everywhere. In New Zealand and on other islands where non-native species are the main threat to beloved natives, we may use humane traps or genetic engineering to remove the newcomers. In other places, threatened species will need help adapting, maybe even a ride to new habitats that aren’t too hot. Intensive management will be required for many species in the short term.

By 2070 huge swaths of the Earth will be managed by indigenous nations, as their sovereignty is finally taken seriously. That will benefit wildlife, since indigenous-run lands turn out to have more species on average than national parks. In some cases traditional methods honed over millennia may be revived—the ones that created the beautiful, thriving landscapes that colonizers encountered when they first invaded, and mistook for “wild” nature.

For many years I focused on the science of extinctions and climate change, and I looked for technological and policy solutions like solar panels or more parks. Meanwhile, in my private life, I fought for justice for the poor and the oppressed. It took me way too long to connect those battles—to realize that forces such as colonialism and racism are part of the climate crisis and need to be addressed as part of the solution.

In a sense, climate change is an opportunity for us to step up—to grow up—as a species.

Those who benefit the most from fossil fuels aren’t usually the people who suffer the most from their use. Power plants and their toxic fumes, for example, are disproportionately found in poor, nonwhite neighborhoods. The disconnect crosses borders: One analysis has suggested that the gap in per capita GDP between the poorest and richest countries is already 25 percent wider than it would be without climate change, largely because temperature increases in tropical countries reduce agricultural productivity. Larger storms, droughts, and floods are already hurting the world’s poorest.

The 2015 Paris Agreement included a mechanism for richer countries to help poorer ones, to begin to make things right. The funding so far is inadequate, but it can be expected to grow, especially once the U.S. government accepts the global scientific consensus and rejoins the agreement. Some funds could be used to build climate research centers in hard-hit regions—“a kind of epistemic reparations,” according to Olúfémi Táíwò , a philosopher at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He points out that centuries of colonization concentrated not only wealth but also the best universities in rich nations, creating a brain drain out of poorer ones.

Real climate justice would make Earth more resilient even as it helped humanity heal from historic trauma and pain. In a sense, climate change is an opportunity for us to step up—to grow up—as a species.

There is a new needlewoman in my family. My daughter, now 10, loves to sew. I like to imagine the life she’ll lead when she is 60.

The first thing she notices as she wakes up in her city apartment in 2070 is the birdsong: a raucous dawn chorus, a multispecies symphonic alarm clock. It’s easy to hear because there’s no traffic noise. She flips on her light, powered by solar shingles that cover nearly every roof in the city. Her building is itself built of “drawdown blocks” made from carbon captured from the atmosphere.

She gets up, has some coffee. She doesn’t have to hunt for “fair trade” or “ bird friendly” coffee because everything on the grocery shelf qualifies. She hops on a zero-emissions train that automatically pauses for two minutes because cameras down the line detect a family of foxes approaching the tracks. The sky is bright blue, undimmed by smog, albeit a little hotter than in 1970. In the distance she can see elegant windmills spinning.

When she reaches her stop, she steps out into a huge cloud of migrating monarch butterflies, en route to milkweed patches growing in a nearby park. People on the platform pause and let the butterflies wash over them.

She gets a message: She’s invited to a party to celebrate the 100th Earth Day—a party, not a protest. There are no reluctant politicians left to convince. There are no gasoline cars left to bury. There will be a band and dancing, six kinds of meatless tacos and ‘ehpaa— prickly pear cactus—imported from the Kumeyaay Nation, near San Diego.

As she walks down the street, she stops and picks a half dozen eucalyptus seedpods off the ground, remembering vaguely that there was some talk in the early 21st century about cutting them all down because they weren’t native to the Americas. Holding them in her hand, she decides to sew them around the collar of her green dress to wear at the party.

She gets another message: It’s me! I am 91 years old. I want to come to the party too.

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September 10, 2021

What will the planet look like in 50 years? Here's how climate scientists figure it out

by Margo Rosenbaum

Climate change scientists don't like to use the term "prediction." Rather, they're making "projections" about the future of the planet as sea levels rise, wildfires sweep the West and hurricanes become more ferocious.

There's a good reason for that.

In a world awash in misinformation—about medicine, politics and climate, and pretty much everything else—part of a scientist's job now involves teaching the public about how science works. Convincing the public to have faith in science means making precise, measured projects about the future.

They've got to overcome the big question: Can you really make accurate projections about what the planet will look like in 50 years, a century from now?

Climate scientists think they can, based on the past five decades of climate science that has proven accurate. Futurists, such as Jamais Cascio, a distinguished fellow for the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit foresight group based in Silicon Valley, study present trends and available data to lay out plausible outcomes for the future.

Today, a lot of Cascio's work is centered around climate change, helping people prepare for the future and make informed decisions for a warming world.

"Everything in the world," Cascio said, "every future outcome will have to be examined through the lens of climate."

In the future, climate change may only get worse. But how much worse will it get?

Scientists have relied on climate models for over 50 years. To people who aren't scientists, it's challenging to understand the calculations that go into these projections. So, what exactly is a climate model?

Meteorologists can make weather predictions for the next hour, or even week, based on weather data and forecast models that use humidity, temperature, air pressure, wind speed, among other current atmospheric, land and oceanic conditions. But with climate, a specific region's weather averaged over decades, is a little more challenging to project and understand.

An extension of weather forecasting, climate models factor in even more atmospheric, land and oceanic conditions to make longer-term forecasts. Using mathematical equations and thousands of data points, the models create representations of physical conditions on earth and simulations of the current climate.

Climate models predict how average conditions will change in a region over the coming decades as well as how the climate appeared before humans recorded it.

Researchers can then understand how these changing conditions could impact the planet, which is useful especially for understanding climate change, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center based in the Bay Area.

"Perhaps the most important (purpose) is to try to suggest the types of changes that might occur as the world continues to emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases," Hausfather said.

The first climate model, developed over 50 years ago in the early days of climate science, helped scientists gauge how the ocean and atmosphere interacted with each other to influence the climate. The model predicted how temperature changes and shifts in ocean and atmospheric currents could lead to climate change.

Today, these models are much more complicated and run on some of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A decade ago, most models broke up the world into 250-kilometer segments, but now the models are 100 square kilometers. More regional patterns emerge when simulations are at a finer scale.

"People aren't drawing a picture of temperature and carbon dioxide and drawing a line through it and then extrapolating that into the future," said Gavin A. Schmidt, a senior climate adviser at NASA.

Through these advancements in technology, these models are becoming even more useful to scientists in understanding the climate of the past, present and future.

"Fortunately, they don't do such a terrible job," Schmidt said.

All of this works toward convincing the public and businesses to take action.

A majority of Americans already notice the effects of climate change around them, according to a Pew Research Center survey from 2020. But individuals, businesses and politics must "adapt to a radically and dangerously changing climate," Cascio said.

On the individual level, people must consider the climate in all of their monumental decisions: whether to have children; which car to buy; how to invest; when and where to buy a house. Governments are tasked with climate decisions that impact the future of entire nations, such as whether to invest in alternative energy or write policy curbing emissions.

Are climate models useful?

Instead of thinking about climate models as whether or not they are right, Schmidt said climate models should be considered as to whether they provide useful forecasts.

"Do they tell us things? Do they get things right more than you would have done without them?" Schmidt said.

Usually, the answer is yes, and what these models inform scientists is crucial for their understanding of the future climate.

Hausfather knows this better than anyone, as he led a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters analyzing the accuracy of early climate models. Some of the findings were included in the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published in August.

Hausfather, along with co-author Schmidt, compared 17 model projections of global average temperature developed between 1970 and 2007 with actual changes in global temperature observed through the end of 2017.

Hausfather and his colleagues found promising news: Most of the models have been quite accurate. More specifically, 10 of the model projections show results consistent with observations. Of the remaining seven model projections, four projected more warming than observed while three projected less warming than observed.

But Hausfather and his colleagues realized this wasn't telling the whole story. After accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other factors driving the climate, it turns out 14 of 17 model projections were "effectively identical" to warming observed in the real world.

"That was strong evidence that these models are effectively right," Hausfather said. "They're doing a very good job of predicting global temperatures."

The accuracy was particularly impressive in the earliest climate models, Hausfather said, especially given the limited observational evidence of warming at the time.

But not all of the early models were error-free. One of the first climate models, created in 1971 by climate scientists Rasool and Schneider, projected that the world would cool due to the cooling effect of atmospheric aerosols.

"(The researchers) thought that the cooling effect of these aerosols from burning fossil fuels that would reflect sunlight back to space would be much stronger than the warming effects of the greenhouse gas," Hausfather said.

While the 1970s were still in the early days of climate research, most of the scientific literature of the time was still pointing toward a warming future as much more likely. Yet, Rasool and Schneider's model still spurred a slew of news stories about a potential ice age. Even today, the model "still gets trotted out every now and then by folks trying to discredit climate science today," Hausfather said.

Now the model is proven to be wrong. It's a consensus among climate scientists that the planet is not cooling—instead it's warming at an alarming rate.

Even today, despite the promise of climate models shown by Hausfather's study, these models still have their limitations, especially with regard to the uncertainty of future emissions. Climate scientists are physicists—not economists or political scientists, and it's challenging to understand how policy will shape emissions standards.

"We don't have a crystal ball that can predict the future human behavior in terms of how much our emissions will change," Hausfather said. "We can just predict how the climate will respond to the emissions."

Issues of accuracy in climate models also still arise when models are pushed outside of their specific parameters. To combat this, climate models focus their projections on physical conditions seen in the natural world, instead of statistical probability, Schmidt said.

Researchers have more confidence in the predictability of physics than statistics, because physics doesn't change into the future. Researchers can have confidence that they can use these models outside of the time period where they have observational data, such as looking at climate during the last ice age, Schmidt said.

"How things get expressed might be different but the basic physics ... the underlying processes don't really change," Schmidt said.

Hausfather said there's still a lot of work still to improve climate models, but they are consistently getting better over time. Simulations of the Earth become sharper as more physical processes are added and computer power grows.

Why make projections for the future?

While climate scientists focus on physics to make forecasts for the future climate, Cascio and other futurists place scientific data in a larger context, making foresight based on climate change, new technological developments, as well as political and social movements. Futurism is "essentially anticipatory history," Cascio said.

"The idea is to take the science and embed it into a historian's understanding of how the world works to try to get a sense of what are the possible outcomes that we see going forward," Cascio said.

But, just like with climate models , uncertainty is inherent to the nature of projections. Futurists do not want to over-promise, but they provide a forecast of what could happen and reasons why it could happen, Cascio said.

Most of Cascio's work with climate change projects a grim future. In his perspective, an "absolutely radical" and "transformative" climate plan is necessary to make the necessary change. Plans that are "sensible and acceptable (are) almost definitely not enough."

"I really want to be wrong about all of this stuff," Cascio said, "because there are no futures that are not really depressing for the next generation."

Despite the despair projected by many climate scientists and futurists, there's still hope. If global emissions can be brought down to zero, Hausfather said the best climate model estimates illustrate that the world will stop warming.

"It's not too late to act," Hausfather said. "The world is not locked into a particular amount of warming."

Cascio still tries to consider himself a long-term optimist for the future, because the changes necessary to mitigate climate change will also lead to a much more "transparent and equitable" world, he said.

"If we can make it through the second half of this century, there's a very good chance that what we'll end up with is a really wonderful world," Cascio said.

Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Our Planet. Our Future

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen

Thank you for coming here today, and thank you to the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area for organizing this gathering to celebrate UN Day. My thanks also to the UN Foundation for their support of this event, which is part of the UNA-NCA’s efforts to build a strong UN-US partnership. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you and make my small contribution to this worthwhile goal.

Our discussions today are themed around “Our Planet. Our Future” for good reason. The health of our planet and humanity’s future are inseparable. Both are in serious danger.

Multiple threats

I often talk about the multiple threats facing people and planet. Climate change is eating into our well-being, economic development, peace and stability, and unfortunately unless we take action, it will only get worse. In converting land for agriculture, infrastructure and urban expansion, we have destroyed ecosystems, biodiversity and the services they provide. We are polluting the land, air and sea, causing millions of deaths each year, burdening healthcare systems and, again, destroying nature’s foundations. In reality, though, there is only one threat: humanity. Our reliance on fossil fuels, our pursuit of unrestrained growth, our prioritization of the short-term over the long has caused these challenges. We are our own worst enemy.

Tipping point

But things are changing. I am sure many of you either attended, or followed, the Climate Action Summit, the other summits and the General Assembly last month. You saw, as I did, governments, international organizations, the private sector, civil society, and powerful young voices coming together to find more-sustainable ways of running our societies.

People are taking to the streets to insist  that we change our ways. We are seeing environmental concerns dominate in the media, in voting booths, in cabinet meetings, in city councils, in the boardroom, and in classrooms.

The UN has always been at the core of finding common grounds and the platform where we develop collective action, whether on the Sustainable Development Goals or the Paris Agreement. The environment challenge is one that travels across boundaries, and in a sense, binds nations together. The environment is the platform that can enable multilateral action.

The role of UNEP

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The United Nations Environment Programme – as the authoritative voice on the environment within the UN system – is dedicated to this better future. UNEP has been at the heart of the environmental movement since the Stockholm Conference in 1972. It has been central to bringing us to the positive tipping point on environmental action we see today. UNEP’s main task now is to build on the new support to ensure humanity prospers in harmony with the planet.

So, how do we do this? UNEP does not view climate change, ecosystem and biodiversity loss, and pollution as separate issues. They are all closely interlinked and driven by the same forces. To negate these forces, UNEP is focusing on three transformations.

Decarbonize economies

We must decarbonize our economies. This means a rapid transition to clean, renewable energy – accompanied by improved energy efficiency in everything from vehicles to appliances. We have made progress. Renewable energy is beginning to edge out fossil fuels. Investment in renewable energy capacity from 2010 to the end of 2019 is likely to reach a cumulative 2.6 trillion US dollars. In 2017, renewables avoided an estimated 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. But we can do much more. If we shift investments and subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables, we can slow climate change, cut air pollution, create sustainable jobs and power  communities across the world.  

Decouple and detoxify

Fixing the planet’s problems is not as simple as weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, however. We need to rethink how we exploit resources, how we build our cities and infrastructure, how we grow our food, and how we manage our waste. Our production and consumption is unsustainable. Natural resource use has tripled from 1970 and continues to grow. Extraction and processing of materials, fuels and food causes 50 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 90 per cent of biodiversity loss and water stress. We need to move to circular economy models that decouple growth from resource use and detoxify our planet.

Work with nature, not against it

It is just as crucial to place nature at the heart of our societies. Nature-based solutions – such as large-scale afforestation – can deliver one-third of the cuts needed to meet the 1.5 degree C target of the Paris Agreement. They can restore biodiversity, boost livelihoods and health, and create climate resilience. To give just one example, restoring 350 million hectares of degraded landscapes by 2030 could generate 9 trillion US dollars in ecosystem services, and put significant amounts of carbon back in the ground. We need to embed nature in our cities, our infrastructure, our farmlands and our working landscapes. We need to value nature, and account for it in every decision at every level.

These are the transformations we  need. Let me now turn to what UNEP is doing to make them a reality. There are many strands to our work, but they all have one common factor: multilateralism.

Science-Policy interface

UNEP’s core task is to link science to policy action by governments.

We support governments in delivering stronger commitments under every international accord – including the three Rio Conventions: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

UNEP’s science and know-how also helps governments design and implement the right policies to make these commitments a reality. UNEP co-founded the world’s top independent climate and biodiversity science bodies, the IPCC and IPBES, and continues to work with them. It founded the International Resource Panel. It publishes reports that track progress, or lack thereof, such as the Emissions Gap and the Global Environment Outlook series. It provides direct technical advice on issues as diverse as duty regimes promoting electric vehicles and policies that reduce food waste.

Multilateral Agreements

While action by individual governments is important, it is only through globally agreed rules that we can transform the whole planet. With this in mind, UNEP hosts the secretariats of many global multilateral agreements – such as those on biodiversity, the trade in species, and chemicals and waste – and works closely with those it does not.

These agreements demonstrate the power of multilateralism, which is no more apparent than in the Montreal Protocol. Under the Protocol, the world slashed the use of gases that were causing the hole in the ozone layer. The ozone layer is on track to completely recover by mid-century, protecting human health and ecosystems. The Protocol is now targeting climate change under its Kigali Amendment. This amendment aims to shave 0.4 degrees C off global warming this century by phasing down climate-warming gases used in the cooling industry.

Working with cities

It is important to note that our work is not just with national governments. We collaborate and inform at all levels, with a growing focus on cities. Over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, making them major drivers of environmental challenges. But just as cities cause problems, they can solve them. Well-designed cities could cut up to 54 per cent off greenhouse gas emissions, and save on land, water and metals. They can make buildings zero-emission and resilient. They can prioritize sustainable transport solutions. They can implement energy and resource efficiency measures and nature-based solutions – such as the renaturing of urban spaces to bring biodiversity back and keep cities cool naturally.

All of these levers are in the hands of local governments, which is why UNEP is working with the C40 cities network and individual cities on everything from clean and efficient cooling to exploring innovative new building designs.

Private sector

UNEP also collaborates with the private sector, without whom system shifts at speed and scale will not be possible. We need private capital. But our main message to the private sector is that bottom lines are dependent on backing sustainability. We help them see the environmental externalities in their supply chains, which are already hitting profits. We encourage banks, businesses and investors see that the smart money on sustainability.

The private sector is increasingly hearing this message and acting. At the Climate Action Summit, 130 banks signed up to the Principles of Responsible Banking, which UNEP created with leading banks. These banks, collectively holding 47 trillion US dollars in assets, are promising to align their businesses with the Paris Agreement and the SDGs. We also saw institutional investors promise to transition their portfolios – worth 2 trillion US dollars – to net-zero emissions by 2050, under the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance.

Partnerships and coalitions

UNEP is a small organization, but it punches above its weight. It does this by creating partnerships and coalitions across the UN system, governments, the private sector and civil society. There are too many examples to list, so let me highlight one of the newest: The Cool Coalition. Members of this UNEP-led coalition, including multinational corporations, have made real commitments to reducing the climate impact of the cooling industry, while increasing access to life-saving technology.

The benefits of action are huge. A 30 per cent improvement in the energy efficiency of room air conditioners could avoid the need for 2,500 power plants and save 3 trillion US dollars by 2050. Meanwhile, halving food loss with sustainable refrigeration and cold chains could help to feed one billion undernourished people.

I could go on. I could talk about our work encouraging ordinary citizens to adopt sustainable lifestyles. I could point to our work reducing resource-based conflicts and helping communities recover from disaster. I could tell you how we help boost the enforcement of environmental laws. But I have talked enough.

How we can improve

Let me just close by saying that UNEP is striving to improve in this new era of multilateralism. UNEP is working more collaboratively internally to ensure that environmental challenges are treated as one. It is reaching deeper into other sectors to influence decisions made there – part of which means changing the UN Environment Assembly to include a wider range of actors. It is looking to take advantage of the UN reform process to work closer with UN offices on the ground, heeding the call for support on the environmental dimensions of the SDGs.

UNEP must improve quickly, as must everybody. We are up against the clock. The next few years will be critical. We have nations updating their pledges under the Paris Agreement. We have the Convention on Biological Diversity setting the post-2020 framework on biodiversity. We have preparations for the UN Decade for Ecosystem Restoration.

In just three years’ time, it will the 50 th anniversary of the Stockholm Declaration, which said, “A point has been reached in history when we must shape our actions throughout the world with a more prudent care for their environmental consequences.” The world has not lived up to these words. By 2022, we must be sure that our societies are finally on the right path.

There is no excuse. With the multilateral processes in place, and levels of support never seen before, we can recalibrate our relationship with the environment. We can design and implement an inclusive global society that thrives within planetary limits. We can ensure a better future for this planet and all of the creatures that live on it.

UNEP is fully engaged in making this future a reality. Your very presence here today tells me that you are too. And for that, I thank you.

Inger Andersen

Executive Director, UN Environment Programme

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Essay on Conservation of the Environment: Preserving Our Planet for Future Generations

Title: conservation of the environment: preserving our planet for future generations, introduction:.

The environment is the very foundation of our existence, providing us with the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the resources we depend upon for survival. However, the rapid pace of industrialization, urbanization, and unsustainable practices has put tremendous pressure on our ecosystems, endangering the delicate balance of nature. In this essay, we will delve into the importance of conserving the environment and discuss the measures we can take to preserve it for future generations.

1. Biodiversity Preservation:

One of the primary reasons for conserving the environment is to protect biodiversity, the incredible variety of life on Earth. Every species, from microscopic organisms to majestic animals, plays a crucial role in maintaining the equilibrium of ecosystems. By preserving biodiversity, we ensure the resilience and stability of ecosystems, which in turn benefits human health, agriculture, and overall well-being. Conservation efforts, such as the establishment of protected areas and the prevention of habitat destruction, are essential for safeguarding the intricate web of life.

2. Sustainable Resource Management:

Conserving the environment involves managing our natural resources in a sustainable manner. This means using resources responsibly, minimizing waste, and reducing our reliance on non-renewable sources. By embracing practices like recycling, energy efficiency, and sustainable agriculture, we can reduce our ecological footprint and ensure the long-term availability of vital resources. Sustainable resource management also includes protecting forests, which act as carbon sinks, provide habitat for countless species, and contribute to the overall health of our planet.

3. Climate Change Mitigation:

Environmental conservation is closely linked to mitigating climate change, one of the most pressing global challenges of our time. The burning of fossil fuels and deforestation have led to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, resulting in rising temperatures and severe weather events. By transitioning to clean and renewable energy sources, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and promoting climate-friendly practices, we can limit the impacts of climate change and protect vulnerable ecosystems and communities.

4. Water and Air Quality Protection:

Conserving the environment also involves safeguarding the quality of our water and air, essential resources for all life forms. Pollution from industrial activities, improper waste disposal, and harmful agricultural practices has contaminated water bodies and compromised air quality. By implementing strict regulations, adopting sustainable practices, and investing in water and air treatment technologies, we can ensure clean and safe environments for current and future generations.

5. Environmental Education and Advocacy:

Education and awareness are pivotal in fostering a culture of environmental conservation. By educating individuals about the importance of environmental protection, we can empower them to make informed choices and take action. Environmental advocacy plays a crucial role in influencing policy decisions, promoting sustainable practices, and holding corporations and governments accountable for their environmental impact. By coming together as a global community, we can amplify our efforts and create a collective movement for the conservation of our planet.

Conclusion:

Conservation of the environment is not just a responsibility; it is a moral imperative for the survival and well-being of future generations. By preserving biodiversity, practicing sustainable resource management, mitigating climate change, and protecting water and air quality, we can ensure a sustainable and thriving planet. It is crucial for individuals, communities, governments, and organizations to work hand in hand to prioritize environmental conservation. By nurturing a deep respect and appreciation for nature, we can pave the way for a harmonious coexistence with our environment and secure a brighter future for all.

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Writing an Essay on the Environment

Our living conditions have an impact on how we behave and interact with other people. The effects of changing weather patterns and temperatures on living things have come under increasing scrutiny over time.

Although pollution and biodiversity are two additional topics worth writing about, climate change is undoubtedly one of the most dangerous and prevalent issues. Making a solid essay on the environment involves several steps beyond simply deciding what to write about.

There are a few things to consider when writing a paper on the environment. Of course, the format and citation style required for academic writing vary depending on the instructor. Remember to follow these and limit your answers to the question as stated in the assignment prompt. Here are some more pointers for writing an essay well.

Pick a good topic to begin with

Choosing a relevant topic is the most crucial step in producing excellent academic writing. There are numerous environmental factors on which you might base your paper. However, you must ensure that your chosen subject aligns with the assignment’s question, which is stated in the prompt. Of course, there are occasions when professors give their pupils a set of issues to choose from, negating the necessity for topic selection.

In other cases, teachers allow pupils to choose their own themes. With such flexibility comes the obligation to make sure your topic is current and pertinent to your project. Additionally, you must ensure that your topic is narrow enough to fit within the confines of your essay. People who struggle to come up with good ideas might google “ pay someone to write my paper ” to order custom writing from experts online.

Any of the following topics may be covered in your essay on the environment: biodiversity; climate change or global warming and its effects; environmental degradation and how it affects living things.

You must do some research to choose a current and relevant topic because the environment is such a vast subject. Additionally, be sure to focus on your theme.

Think of ideas and make a plan

The next step is brainstorming after you have chosen a topic for your essay. Thinking about the subject and writing down everything you know is what this procedure entails. The notes you’ve made here can be incorporated into your outline.

Having a solid approach when it comes to outlining will help you save time when you are doing your research and writing. The development of a working thesis statement and some preliminary investigation may be necessary at this stage.

Construct a compelling thesis statement

It’s time to develop a workable thesis now that you have a topic and an outline. Please be aware that while you conduct research and write your statement, it may change multiple times. You might come across new concepts as you work and alter your viewpoint on significant subjects. Any writer from the best writing services would say that your thesis should be concise, clear, debatable, and intriguing. It should make clear the stance you aim to defend in your argument.

Conduct analysis and gather sources

If you don’t collect adequate information and supporting facts, composing a solid essay on the environment is impossible. Academic papers of top quality make clear arguments and back up their claims with reliable evidence. Perform research using primary sources, credible websites, online journals, and books. To assist with citations and references, make sure to list the information’s sources. Most importantly, keep thorough notes to make arranging your article simpler.

Get to writing as soon as you can

Do not let the planning consume all of your time and leave no time for writing. Freewriting is allegedly the most straightforward method for overcoming writer’s block. Although there is a better technique, it involves creating an outline and researching each area of your article. Just make sure to give each critical point a paragraph and back it up with examples and proof from reliable sources.

Grammar and syntax shouldn’t be your main focus as you compose your article. Just focus on developing your ideas and points at this time. Finish by proofreading your work for grammar, content, and formatting consistency.

Please keep in mind that the advice given in this article is intended to help you as you write an academic essay. You must still ensure that your writing follows the guidelines for your assignment. The most crucial thing is to make sure you proofread and edit your work. You can do it yourself or hire the best college essay writing service to have it done professionally. This will save you from the mistakes and typos, and your essay on the environment will be of an outstanding quality!

Following these tips it will be easier to understand the steps of writing a perfectly done essay without messing it up the night before the deadline. Remember of your main goal – highlight the importance of a particular environmental issue and persuade the readers to do their contribution into its solving.

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How Our Environment Will Become in the Future? Essay Example

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Introduction

Climate change is a global issue and as such has an impact upon all nations on the planet. Each nation has a specific responsibility to reduce carbon emissions and play an active part in the prevention of global warming. Climate Change will result in higher temperatures and this means increased Ultra Violet Radiation (UV-B) content. This will have a direct result in the degradation of plastics and woods that are subject to increased UV levels. This climate is essentially the weather pattern for a specific area.

The concept of climate change refers to variations in the average state of the climate over time. The problem relative to climate change is the result of the concentration of greenhouse gases i.e. CO2 CO4 N20 and CFC’s. These trap infra-red radiation inside the Earth’s atmosphere and create an anomaly that has been termed ‘the greenhouse effect’. This is a natural phenomenon within the normal bounds of nature. Historically nature tends to balance these conditions but mankind has disturbed this fragile balance by burning fossil fuels, deforestation and use of industrial processes that create greenhouse gases.

This imbalance gives ride to increased infra-red radiation, changes in the air temperature, variation to precipitation patterns, changing the sea levels and melting of glaciers. The long term ramifications of climate change have yet to be measured or determined but are seeing marked changes to the expected ‘norms’ of our climate patterns today may result in the need for deployment of alternate more expensive durable materials.

Developed Industrialised Economies

This position is best summed up from in December 2009 at the World Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark the Government of Saudi Arabia was asked to rethink its position on climate change . The developing countries are concerned that the intransigence of the Saudi Government is threatening the survival of the developing nations. The Saudi Government tends to agree in principle on the implications of climate change but takes little affirmative action towards development of a strategy that will contribute towards reduction of CO2 emissions in that country. They constantly refer to the USA and China as being the dominant world polluters and cause of impacting climate change. It is these two countries that should be leading by example in the quest for change.

The argument at Copenhagen is that it is the responsibility of all nations to reduce CO2 emissions and every nation must do its part including Saudi Arabia. After all the goal is the preservation of the planet and if we destroy our environment there will be no need for oil production in the future. Regrettably the very essence of the argument has been largely ignored by the main protagonists.

Developing Countries

Saudi Arabia produces more emissions than the combined output of the Middle East and North Africa and as such makes it one of the world’s major contributors to global warming and climate change. The Energy sectors and Electricity/Heat production account for 60% of the output.

One of the most common problems that climate change will propose for the Middle East is that of a shortage of water. Certain countries like Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria have reliable supplies of surface water but the rest face the increasing prospect of desertification and droughts. The demand for water has increased throughout the Middle East and this will result in future severe water shortages. This in turn will severely impact agricultural production in the region and how future irrigation systems needs will be met. Research has suggested that climate change will have both positive and negative impacts; an example of positive impact might be the decline in the amount of frosts.

Economies in Transition

This considers countries like India and China which are considered as emerging industrial economies. These countries are amongst the biggest contributors of carbon emissions via coal fuelled power stations, industrial pollutants and increased production of automobiles. The Table to the right illustrates the largest emitter’s or producers of CO2 emissions. The USA and China being the largest contributors. In context during 2003 Saudi Arabia was contributing less than 10% of the output produced by the USA.

One of the global concerns of climate change relates to the potential of health challenges that might result from such diseases like Malaria moving into more densely populated areas like that of the Mediterranean Countries and the Middle East. The migration of these parasites may result in them becoming more resistant to existing drugs. Such changes have the potential of putting large populations at risk. The UNDP states that climate change represents an unprecedented threat to all of the nations on our planet and that remedial action is required now and success will only be accomplished by joint nation strategies with international collaboration by all parties concerned.

China and India

China is considered to have the world’s largest carbon footprint. In Copenhagen they stated that they are committed to decisive action “ China stated that it would attempt to reduce carbon emissions by up to 45% by 2020. Despite this being a step in the right direction, by the Chinese Government, the US and Europe felt that the cuts did not go far enough. The US and Europe both voiced concerns that the reductions were not deep enough and that it would need to be a minimum of 50%.

India stated that it would attempt to make reductions by up to 24% in a similar timeframe. Commentators stated that both China and India were at least taking positive moves in the right direction and that Europe needs to improve its overall performance levels in order to make a valid contribution to global efforts.

One of the main issues with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is that it can take up to 100 years in order to disperse. Hence if we stopped CO2 emissions today we could not determine the impact for many decades to come. The European Commission (EU) hopes that by reducing emissions, on average, by -30% by 2020 it will provide a 50/50 chance of reducing global temperatures by 2 degrees C. It is not too late to take action to prevent global warming and climate change but the reality is that we are now into damage control or damage limitation and our climate will be very different in just 20 years from now.

Climate Change and Regional Biodiversity

The USA Great Basin Area|

Scientists are already examining the Great Basin Mountain Range in the USA as one potential area where climate change may result in a change in regional biodiversity. This area provides the main interior drainage from the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. The ranges consist of boreal vegetation, mountain streams and large pine and juniper Forests. This in turn provides a home to a large number of boreal species and animal wildlife. Scientists are able to predict species loss as a result of climate change but not accurately project the number of species extinctions that may result. Scientist predict extinctions in three animal groups across the mountain ranges and the average loss of mammal species is projected at 44%, with 33% loss of vagile butterflies and a substantial loss of plant species, particularly the newer stocks planted in regional parks.

Climate Change in Norway|

One laboratory for climate change has been that of Norway. Here it is possible to examine the impact on the change in precipitation rates. As melting will create more water in the systems they will become more prone to flooding. Norway is already getting warmer and the winters are not as long. The warmer waters may result in many species of fish being killed off and rising waters from the melting arctic ice caps may affect the offshore oil industry. Another aspect is that warmer climates may well see mosquitoes expanding their Territory from Africa into Europe and bringing malaria with them.

Turtles and Global Climate change |

Turtles have been on the planet for an estimated 200 million years and as such, they have proved to be natural survivors. They have survived numerous extinction level events including the passing of the dinosaurs and ice ages. However, mankind’s intervention in the creation of climate change may well pose them a more dangerous challenge. Of the 270 species of Turtles in the world, it is estimated that over 50% are in peril or endangered. It is the threat to their incubation temperatures and loss of habitat that is beginning to threaten their very long-term survival.

Climate Change and biological rates of evolution |

In December 2010, delegates of the United Nations (UN) held a summit to discuss recent developments of the effect of climate change around the world. Scientists stated that they expect the changes to hasten the extinction levels covering many different biological species around the globe. The evolutionary biologists were basing their initial research findings by looking at traits associated with birth, weight and age of reproduction. Further an examination into the expression of gene traits that may become modified by the effect of climate change. Within wild plant and animal populations, it was considered that there are two main factors signifying evolutionary change i.e. the strength of natural selection and the genetic variation that is acted upon.

It is the rising of temperatures that has a direct correlation to the way the trait of selection acts upon species and the genes that control it. Hence, if a rise in temperatures should both strengthen selection and increase the genetic variance, then this should cause acceleration in the evolutionary process. In order to have an improved understanding of this, a research team carried out experiments in the Netherlands on a songbird called ‘The Great Tit’. They examined more than 3,800 breeding records over a 35-year period, along with average daily temperature changes.

The results indicated a strong correlation between that of selection and genetic variance. As such, changes in the environmental conditions exerted a strong influence on the breeding rates amongst the population of birds examined. Although the birds were seen to make some positive adjustments towards adaption, nevertheless there has been recorded a significant decline in the population of these birds over the last decade. This was also linked to the food chain and the early springs causing the caterpillars to emerge before the birds had completed their migration cycle from Africa. Hence the links to the lower end of the food chain.

Biological Symptoms of Warming|

There is now sufficient evidence to support the fact that the central northern hemisphere is indeed warming. Certain dendrochronological data has however suggested that there is some return to normal averages, but this would be expected owing to increased levels of precipitation in the warming event. The temperatures are indeed rising. We are already witnessing a response from the Alaskan White Spruce (picea glauca) which has extended the growing season in the higher latitudes. This may result in certain species replacing the tundra areas by pushing further north. This in turn results in loss of species habitats and further endangers wildlife species.

The Tropical rainforest are considered to be the most species rich place on Earth. Current studies indicate that climate change, particularly increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, are having a profound effect on the biodiversity of the rain forests.

It is now a scientific fact that climate change is happening at an unprecedented rate and this will have a profound effect on the multiple levels of biological organizations. Biologists have already identified a number of instances whereby there has been a rapid response to climate change e.g. mustard fields ( Brassica Rapa), and common cordgrass ( Spartina Anglica) used for the control of erosion. It is considered that in the longer term climate change will have a negative impact on both biological and eco systems.

Impact in the Middle East

The graphs to the right illustrate the CO2 emissions by source in Saudi Arabia. 64% of these are by that of liquid fuels. Saudi Arabia produces more emissions than the combined output of the Middle East and North Africa and as such makes it one of the world’s major contributors to global warming and climate change. The Energy sectors and Electricity/Heat production account for 60% of the output.

Problems and Issues in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has large underground supplies of water but these are in an increased demand situation. There was an increase of 100% of wells being bored in the period between 1982-90. This supply is now being monitored for the impacts of climate change. To assist this the country has been divided into 6 different geographical areas of meteorological study.

In the Noorrdjwijk conference in 1989 Saudi Arabia described global warming as a life or death situation for certain areas of the world and stated in no uncertain terms that CO2 emissions were the main culprit and as such there is a need for the world to reduce these emissions. Despite this they remained non-committal to establishing appropriate targets and timescales. In Saudi Arabia 60% of the population live along the coastal areas, particularly that of the Red Sea Coast. This has become the focal point for construction and subsequently has seen an increase in the level of seaborne pollution taking place. We are now faced with a situation where sewage, toxic materials and other pollutants are seriously damaging the coral reefs. Climate change may well accelerate this process resulting in increased sea levels and the raising of sea temperatures ultimately destroying the coral reefs. This in turn would then result in increased sedimentation of enclosed seas.

The bulk of the Arabian Peninsula is situated in a very arid part of the world. This area shows precipitation of less than 100mm per annum with 300-500mm in the highland regions. This equally results in a great variation between air temperatures 21.9 to 43.6 the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula is situated in a very arid part of the world. This area shows precipitation of less than 100mm per annum with 300-500 mm in the highland regions. This equally results in a great variation between air temperatures 21.9 to 43.6 o C in the coastal areas (May to August) and 11.9 to 24.5oC in the winter months (Dec to Feb). With a projected global increase in our temperatures 1.5 to 4.5oC in the next 50 years; this will result in increased desertification and water shortages.

The UNDP states that climate change represents an unprecedented threat to all of the nations on our planet and that remedial action is required now and success will only be accomplished by joint nation strategies with international collaboration by all parties concerned. The impact of CO2 emissions for Saudi Arabia can broadly be placed into the following classifications:

• Water Shortages – The entire region may be subject to severe water shortages and drought like conditions with rising temperatures.
• Desertification – An extension in the amount of arid land due to increasing of temperatures and lack of rainfall. This may reduce the amount of well bore holes available and create vast tracts of land unsuitable for human dwelling. This again is linked to rising temperatures and water shortages created
• Agriculture – Even slight changes can potentially upset the balance here. Whilst frosts may disappear rising temperatures will create the need for more irrigation but the water supply will not be available .
• Coral Reefs – The sea quality and disappearance of fish in the Red sea owing to rising ocean levels and changes in sea temperatures. Perhaps less of a human impact but more of an ecological disaster
• Animal Life – Historically Saudi Arabia was a rich forested country similar to that of Madagascar. Today it has become a vast region of arid desert land. This will dictate what sort of animal species can live in this land and the lack of water will be a distinctive factor here.

Long Term implications

The long term implications do not bode well for Saudi Arabia unless it can balance the needs of its industrial production with the future safeguard of its country. In some regards this is a question of greed. The Petroleum Industry in Saudi Arabia has been working towards initiatives that reduce CO2 emissions and they have had some success and in particular with Natural Gas Flaring .

Tackling Climate Change

Saudi Arabia needs to consider how clean energy might replace the non-renewable petrochemical industry in the future. One concept might be in the harvesting of solar energy and exporting the electricity to its neighbours. There will need to be a comprehensive strategy in order to address this. In the interim the world demand for consumption of oil is distracting the country from taking real affirmative action against the future consequences of climate change. The best approach would be that of a collaborative approach amongst the Arab nations that developed a comprehensive strategy for the Middle East. This may however prove difficult given the level of distrust between Arab nations.

Conclusions

Research demonstrates that the global long term impact of climate change may have an irreversible adverse impact to our environment and way of life. There is an urgent need for the main industrialised nations of the world to reduce C02 emissions now. Scientists are still unable to predict the long term consequences of our current actions but they are making very pessimistic options for both the oceans, weather and our environmental conditions. There is an urgent need to move away from carbon based fuels to cleaner energy sources.

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Essay on Environment: Examples & Tips

• Updated on  
• May 30, 2022

In the 21st century, the Environmental crisis is one of the biggest issues. The world has been potentially impacted by the resulting hindrance in the environmental balance, due to the rising in industrialization and urbanization. This led to several natural calamities which creates an everlasting severe impact on the environment for years. To familiarize students with the importance environment, the subject ‘Environmental Studies’ is part of the curriculum in primary, secondary as well as higher school education. To test the knowledge of the students related to Environment, a question related to the topic in the form of essay or article writing is included in the exam. This blog aims to focus on providing details to students on the way, they can draft a well-written essay on Environment.

This Blog Includes:

Overview on environment, tips on writing an effective essay, format (150 words), sample essay on environment, environment essay (100 words), essay on environment (200-250 words), environment essay (300 words), world environment day.

To begin the essay on Environment, students must know what it is all about. Biotic (plants, animals, and microorganisms) and abiotic (non-living physical factors) components in our surroundings fall under the terminology of the environment. Everything that surrounds us is a part of the environment and facilitates our existence on the planet.

Before writing an effective essay on Environment, another thing students need to ensure is to get familiarised with the structure of essay writing. The major tips which students need to keep in mind, while drafting the essay are:

• Research on the given topic thoroughly : The students must research the topic given in the essay, for example: while drafting an essay on the environment, students must mention the recent events, so to provide the reader with a view into their understanding of this concept.
• Jot down the important points: When the students research the topic, students must note down the points which need to be included in the essay.
• Quote down the important examples: Students must quote the important examples in the introductory paragraphs and the subsequent paragraphs as well.
• Revise the Essay: The student after finishing writing students must revise the content to locate any grammatical errors as well as other mistakes.

Essay on Environment: Format & Samples

Now that you are aware of the key elements of drafting an essay on Environment, take a look at the format of essay writing first:

Introduction

The student must begin the essay by, detailing an overview of the topic in a very simple way in around 30-40 words. In the introduction of the essay on Environment, the student can make it interesting by recent instances or adding questions.

Body of Content

The content after the introduction can be explained in around 80 words, on a given topic in detail. This part must contain maximum detail in this part of the Essay. For the Environment essay, students can describe ways the environment is hampered and different ways to prevent and protect it.

In the essay on Environment, students can focus on summing the essay in 30-40 words, by writing its aim, types, and purposes briefly. This section must swaddle up all the details which are explained in the body of the content.

Below is a sample of an Essay on Environment to give you an idea of the way to write one:

The natural surroundings that enable life to thrive, nurture, and destroy on our planet called earth are referred to as an environment. The natural environment is vital to the survival of life on Earth, allowing humans, animals, and other living things to thrive and evolve naturally. However, our ecosystem is being harmed as a result of certain wicked and selfish human actions. It is the most essential issue, and everyone should understand how to safeguard our environment and maintain the natural balance on this planet for life to continue to exist.

Nature provides an environment that nourishes life on the planet. The environment encompasses everything humans need to live, including water, air, sunshine, land, plants, animals, forests, and other natural resources. Our surroundings play a critical role in enabling the existence of healthy life on the planet. However, due to man-made technical advancements in the current period, our environment is deteriorating day by day. As a result, environmental contamination has risen to the top of our priority list.

Environmental pollution has a detrimental impact on our everyday lives in a variety of ways, including socially, physically, economically, emotionally, and cognitively. Contamination of the environment causes a variety of ailments that can last a person’s entire life. It is not a problem of a neighborhood or a city; it is a global issue that cannot be handled by a single person’s efforts. It has the potential to end life in a day if it is not appropriately handled. Every ordinary citizen should participate in the government’s environmental protection effort.

Between June 5 and June 16, World Environment Day is commemorated to raise awareness about the environment and to educate people about its importance. On this day, awareness initiatives are held in a variety of locations.

The environment is made up of plants, animals, birds, reptiles, insects, water bodies, fish, humans, trees, microbes, and many other things. Furthermore, they all contribute to the ecosystem.

The physical, social, and cultural environments are the three categories of environments. Besides, various scientists have defined different types and numbers of environments.

1. Do not leave rubbish in public areas. 2. Minimize the use of plastic 3. Items should be reduced, reused, and recycled. 4. Prevent water and soil contamination

Hope the blog has given you an idea of how to write an essay on the Environment. If you are planning to study abroad and want help in writing your essays, then let Leverage Edu be your helping hand. Our experts will assist you in writing an excellent SOP for your study abroad consultant application. 

Sonal is a creative, enthusiastic writer and editor who has worked extensively for the Study Abroad domain. She splits her time between shooting fun insta reels and learning new tools for content marketing. If she is missing from her desk, you can find her with a group of people cracking silly jokes or petting neighbourhood dogs.

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• Save Environment Essay for Students in English

Essay on Save Environment Day

The environment is the surrounding area of our dwelling. It plays a crucial role in our survival and existence. It is in the "environment" where a living thing has its chances of birth, growth, development, and life itself. The cues present in that environment gradually shape their survivability and habitation.

Right from a small age, we are being educated on how to save our environment and help this planet earth to be beautiful. The environment plays a crucial role in shaping the psychological condition and physical provision of a living creature. Over time, it gets to shape living things. Planet earth with loads of environmental issues will have a greater impact in future.

Therefore, it is vitally important to save the environment, since; the very existence of a favorable environment determines the chances for the survivability and development of life within its boundaries.

What is the Environment?

The environment is the area or region which supports certain conditions that enable and benefit the dynamic aspects of its inhabiting forms of life which leads to formation, development, maturity, birth, decay, and death.

What Forms the Environment?

The necessities involved and responsible for the formation of an environment is its conducive surrounding. The surrounding presents the proper cues to look for on which life can form and flourish.

A healthy environment depicts the abundance of suitable and appropriate cues that support the edification of life. Surroundings form the basis of the environment.

How does an Environment influences Life?

The natural environment consists of climate and nature, both of which can affect health. Climate depicts the natural weather conditions which influence nature. Natural environments ensure harmony in Nature.

A poor environment can reduce the lifespan of all creatures – humans and animals alike. It can seriously affect their psychological and physical conditions, that too, in a negative way.

In recent years, there have been many natural disasters or calamities giving out negative outcomes. Wildfires, earthquakes, floods, famine, and other issues are becoming very common.

The Effects of Pollution on Wildlife and Marine Life

Pollution has adverse effects on the natural environment along with its flora and fauna. It alters the natural genetic code of the organisms dwelling in its polluted surroundings. Pollution affects not just the food chain but, it ruins the entire food web. It endangers and is responsible for the extinction of living species.

Initiatives to Save the Environment

The plantation, restoration, and maintenance of green trees are vital to save the degenerating environment. Trees play a crucial role – not only to supply oxygen but also to consume carbon dioxide which is harmful to humans and animals. Deforestation should be discouraged at all costs.  The more we plant trees, the more our environment can be conserved.

Deforestation leads to a large deterioration in soil quality and causes landslides. Improved tree plantation causes afforestation that helps to strengthen the integrity of soil strength.  This helps to reduce soil erosion, landslides, and floods.

Pollution, of all sorts, is a major threat to the environment. Chemicals and pesticides can cause pollution to the same intensity as harmful gasses, smoke, or dust particles.

Another important initiative to follow for saving the environment is waste management. People should be educated about the proper disposal of waste in their house s , area, or city. Regularly cleaning of streets, managing garbage, and other aspects of waste management is important to consider

The environment refers to the natural surroundings and situations in which we exist. Regrettably, this habitat is now under significant jeopardy. This problem is almost entirely due to human actions. These human actions have unquestionably had a negative impact on the ecosystem. Most significantly, this catastrophe jeopardizes the existence of all living creatures on Earth. As a result, environmental protection is extremely important.

Environment-Friendly Strategies

First and foremost, there should be a strong emphasis on tree planting. A tree is, above all, a source of oxygen. As a result of the construction, several trees have been felled. The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere will surely decrease as a result of this. The greater the number of trees planted, the greater the amount of oxygen created. As a result, increasing the number of trees planted will improve people's quality of life.

People must also pay attention to forest conservation. Forests are extremely important to the environment. On the other side, deforestation reduces the size of forests all over the world. Government-led forest conservation activities are required. The government should make forest destruction a criminal offense.

Another important technique for environmental protection is soil conservation. In order to achieve this, landslides, floods, and soil erosion must all be controlled. To assist conserve the soil, afforestation and tree planting should be done. Terrace farming and the use of natural fertilizers are two other options.

The Advantages of Environmental Conservation

For starters, the global climate will remain normal. Pollution and environmental devastation have contributed to global warming. As a result, many humans and animals have died. As a result, environmental preservation will aid in the prevention of global warming.

People's health would improve. As a result of pollution and deforestation, many people's health is worsening. Environmental conservation will surely help people's health. Most importantly, preserving the environment will minimize the prevalence of numerous diseases.

If the environment is rescued, animals will surely be safeguarded. Many species will not become extinct as a result of environmental preservation. The population of many endangered animals would likewise increase.

The water level would rise as a result. Groundwater levels have been substantially lowered due to environmental damage. Additionally, clean drinking water is in low supply all throughout the world. As a result, a large number of people grew sick and perished. Such issues could be avoided by conserving the environment.

To summarize, the environment is a priceless treasure in this world. Our environment is in grave jeopardy. The necessity to save the environment is urgent. Without a doubt, it is Humanity's most serious concern right now. Any delay could be detrimental in this regard.

Therefore, we can see that the environment plays a far more important factor in shaping life than we can imagine. It is responsible not only for physical well-being but can impact the psychological factors of its constituents as well. Promoting a healthy and clean environment is the basic need of any individual living on this planet earth. Living a healthy environment can help our coming generation to live a healthy life.

FAQs on Save Environment Essay for Students in English

1. What are the significant factors that harm the environment?

There are various circumstances at play, which can determine the condition of an environment like pollution, deforestation, and global warming. Human activity has been attributed to the cause of hundreds of extinctions over the past two centuries. These activities have also helped to increase global warming and other environmental issues. Some of the factors harming the environment are- Overpopulation, Pollution, Global Warming, Climate Change, Genetic Modification, and Ocean Acidification. Pollution is an increasing cause of harming the environment. The fog is seen as smog and increasing respiratory congestion.

2. How do we save the Environment?

For us to save the environment, we must first identify the factors that harm it and deal with them in a proper scientific manner. The first is to Control at Receiver’s End- It is best regarded if rigorous pollution controls are maintained strictly and occasionally. Experts and professionals must carry out thorough checking of the sources of pollution (e.g. automobiles). The second is Reducing Pollution from Emitting Sources- Vehicles or sources of pollution must have proper filters that reduce CO 2 emissions in the environment. Filters are to be applied to all polluting sources. And the last is Encouraging more Tree Plantation- The increase in tree plantation can significantly reduce pollution in the environment.

3. Who should take precautions for Environmental Conditions?

People that are working in pollution control centers or at places where pollution or toxicity levels are high. We as humans have a greater responsibility to save our environment. Controlling population, following waste management, and following other aspects of environmental issues. The Government of India and even globally is doing its best to assist citizens to have a friendly environment. Providing waste management assistance, cleaning streets, garbage and lakes are some of the assistance offered to have a better life.

4. Why should one we deforestation?

We all know trees are an important part of human life. They provide us oxygen and take in the carbon dioxide we exhale. If we start cutting down the trees the lack of oxygen will result in various respiratory-related illnesses and diseases. Along with the deficiency of oxygen, the fresh air will get finished and global warming can increase. It is important to plant twice the amount of trees that are cut. Trees are very important as they provide a home to birds and animals. Hence one should stop deforestation.

5. How to write an essay on the Environment?

The Save Environment Essay for Students in English provides students and examples on how to write an essay on the topic. The main important part is to understand how to start and how to end. The introduction and conclusion of the important paragraphs in an essay. The body should consist of details and descriptions. After you read the essay from Vedantu , you’ll understand how to write it in a problem format. With regular practice and learning, students will be able to write essays with proper grammar.

Human Impacts on the Environment

Humans impact the physical environment in many ways: overpopulation, pollution, burning fossil fuels, and deforestation. Changes like these have triggered climate change, soil erosion, poor air quality, and undrinkable water. These negative impacts can affect human behavior and can prompt mass migrations or battles over clean water.

Help your students understand the impact humans have on the physical environment with these classroom resources.

Earth Science, Geology, Geography, Physical Geography

World Environment Day Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on world environment day.

World environment day Essay – Our environment is one of the most important aspects to survive on this planet. Moreover, it is the only thing that can make life sustainable. Without it, we cannot survive even a single day. For instance, our skin will burn, the lungs will get ruptured, our blood pressure would rise.

Furthermore, we will not have food and water to survive. And this will also be possible because of the imbalance of heat and atmospheric pressur e. Thus it is important that we should take care of the environment. Also, abandon all the exploitation that we are causing it.

World Environment Day

World Environment on 5th June every year. People from more than 100 countries celebrate this day. Furthermore, the world environment day is run by the United Nations Environment Programme(UNEP). Since the year 1973. Above all the main purpose of celebrating this day was to spread awareness. The awareness was about the conservation of our environment.

Moreover to also take various preventive measures to avert the effects of Global warming. Since we all know that Global warming is the root cause of the ruin of our environment. Therefore it is our duty to protect our environment. And stop all the exploitation that is destroying it. Because in the end, it is our basic need for our survival and our generations ahead.

What do we do on World Environment Day?

On the world environment day, we all take a day off from our work. And join various campaigns to spread awareness about environment protection. Moreover, we all plant small saplings in a barren land so that it may grow and flourish in the land area after some years. Also, we take part in various processions to make people aware of this day. So that they may also take part in protecting our environment.

Furthermore, in schools, the teachers teach the students the methods to plant a tree. The school provides buses to take the students to the jungles. There they come to know about the different types of plants. And the types of vegetation in which they survive. Also, the students have to bring a sapling from their homes and plant them inside the ground. This helps them in getting practical knowledge. Further, it also creates an emotional attachment to the environment.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

World Environment Day 2019

The theme for world environment day 2019 is ‘ Air Pollution’ . Furthermore this year China was the host country for this day. Air pollution is one of the major causes of Global Warming. Because of which many hazardous Consequences are arising. The problem is reaching a point where people are not able to breathe properly.

Moreover, disease like lung cancer is affecting even the minors. As a result, is a major threat to the people living in urban areas. To reduce the risk of air pollution China is establishing various air purifiers in their ecosystem. With the help of these people are at least getting pollution-free air to breathe.

In addition, it is also taking mandatory measures like population reduction, banning the use of plastic, and planting trees in every community. This can help to avert the ruining of the environment caused in the past years.

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Research progress and hotspots in microbial remediation for polluted soils, 1. introduction, 2. materials and methods, 2.1. data source, 2.2. research methods, 3. results and analysis, 3.1. number of publications and distribution across disciplines, 3.2. countries/regions and institutions of publications, 3.3. major international journals and key publications, 3.4. keyword clustering analysis, 3.5. research focus and development trends, 4. discussion, 4.1. research trends and hotspots of microbial remediation of contaminated soil, 4.2. mechanism and influencing factors of microbial remediation of contaminated soil, 5. future research directions, 6. conclusions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Share and Cite

Zhao, S.; Yuan, X.-T.; Wang, X.-H.; Ai, Y.-J.; Li, F.-P. Research Progress and Hotspots in Microbial Remediation for Polluted Soils. Sustainability 2024 , 16 , 7458. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177458

Zhao S, Yuan X-T, Wang X-H, Ai Y-J, Li F-P. Research Progress and Hotspots in Microbial Remediation for Polluted Soils. Sustainability . 2024; 16(17):7458. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177458

Zhao, Shuai, Xue-Tao Yuan, Xiao-Hong Wang, Yan-Jun Ai, and Fu-Ping Li. 2024. "Research Progress and Hotspots in Microbial Remediation for Polluted Soils" Sustainability 16, no. 17: 7458. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177458

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The future of the universe

Astrophysicist Risa Wechsler studies the evolution of the universe.

She says that our understanding of how the universe formed and how it will change over time is changing as new technologies for seeing and measuring space come online, like a new high-resolution camera that can quickly map the full sky to see everything that moves, or new spectrographs that will map the cosmos in 3D and enable us to get new clues about the elusive dark matter. You can’t understand the universe or our presence in it until you understand dark matter, Wechsler tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform:

Related : Risa Wechsler , professor of physics and of particle physics and astrophysics

[00:00:00] Risa Wechsler: We get to ask and try to answer the biggest questions that we have. So these are questions like how did the universe evolve from early times until the present day? What is it made of? And how did galaxies form?

[00:00:21] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast and I'm your host Russ Altman. If you're enjoying the show or if it's helped you in any way, please consider rating and reviewing to share your thoughts. Your input is extremely valuable and helps others discover what the show is all about.

[00:00:37] Today, Professor Risa Wechsler will tell us about the universe, cosmology, how galaxies form, how they evolve, and how we're measuring them. It's the future of the universe. 

[00:00:48] Before we get started, another reminder to rate and review the show, particularly if you've learned something new, or found it helpful in any way.

[00:01:03] For thousands of years, we humans have looked up to the skies and wondered about the universe. We see planets and the Moon, but we also see stars and galaxies far, far away. We don't really understand the details of how big is the universe? Are we at the center of the universe or are we near the edge? How do you even measure that?

[00:01:24] Well, Professor Risa Wechsler from Stanford University is a professor of physics, particle physics, and astrophysics. And she is an expert at studying the universe, how it's expanding, and how galaxies within the universe evolve. She's especially interested in the galaxy that we live in, the Milky Way galaxy, my personal favorite galaxy.

[00:01:46] Risa, you study the universe and the galaxies within the universe. What are the big questions that your group is struggling with these days? 

[00:01:56] Risa Wechsler: Yeah, so, you know, I got into um, astrophysics and cosmology because we get to ask and try to answer the biggest questions that we have. So these are questions like how did the universe evolve from early times until the present day? What is it made of and how did galaxies form? So big picture, those are the questions that I have been interested in and continue to be interested in. And um, we have a lot of exciting tools that we, that my group is using to try to answer those questions. 

[00:02:30] Russ Altman: Great. So let's get right into the tools. 'Cause I think, I mean, we could start with a lot of definitions and I'm sure we're going to have to define some terms. But let's just go with, tell us about some of the technologies and what are you measuring and how are you looking at these galaxies, uh, and the extent of the universe?

[00:02:46] Risa Wechsler: Yeah, that's great. I mean, one of the things that I'm really excited about right now at this moment is that we have a bunch of surveys that either have just come online or are about to come online that are gonna be able to map the universe substantially better than we have been able to do before. So one of those that we're playing a big role here in, at Stanford and SLAC is called the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time. 

[00:03:17] Russ Altman: Okay.

[00:03:17] Risa Wechsler: This is the largest camera that has ever been built. It's a three point two gigapixel camera. Um, and, uh, we actually, uh, just put it in the box last week, um, up at SLAC and are shipping it to Chile very soon. Um, and that camera is exciting because it's going to survey the entire Southern sky, essentially every three nights, over ten years, it'll take more than eight hundred pictures of each patch of the sky with this incredibly precise camera. 

[00:03:47] Russ Altman: Yes.

[00:03:48] Risa Wechsler: And that's going to allow us to make, um, you know, a better map than we ever have before. And that's just one of the instruments that we now have, um, or will have in the next few years to make these kinds of maps. So in my group, what we're particularly interested in is essentially how do we use the information from all of these maps, um, different kinds of resolution, different kinds of data, different fields of view, uh, that go to different depths. And put them all together in essentially a self-consistent picture for how the universe evolved, um, using computer simulations and modeling to try to, uh, you know, help us piece together the entire evolution of the universe and what it's made of.

[00:04:37] Russ Altman: Okay, so like great. So that was great because now I have a million questions. First of all, what does a map mean to you? So I think about maps, I think about maybe a 2D map of the of roads and streets and google map. Sometimes you can imagine a 3D map like of the universe, of the solar system with the Sun, the planets are going around it.

[00:04:57] So when you say a map of the universe, is it three dimensional coordinates? I'm guessing maybe not, but maybe yes. Tell me what it looks like? 

[00:05:05] Risa Wechsler: Yeah, that's a perfect question and a perfect introduction to these different kinds of measurements that we can make. 

[00:05:12] So, uh, you can think of most of the measurements we make, it's a little bit more complicated than this, but you can think of most of the measurements we make as either a 2D map that can give you some fuzzy information in the third dimension, or a quite precise 3D map. And, um, the way we get, so when you take a picture, you basically have a 2D map, um, the, so the way you get that third dimension, which of course we want, because what's super exciting in the universe is when you look far away, you are also looking back in time. So the further away we can look and the more precisely we can pin down what that third dimension is, the better we can really make that third map and go, you know, ideally back to the very early stages of the universe when galaxies first started to form.

[00:06:03] Russ Altman: And just to clarify, just to, sorry to interrupt, but the reasons that it's looking back in time is because light takes a certain amount of time to reach us and so that the things that are farthest away sent their light to us the longest time ago. And so the farthest ones are kind of the oldest, and that's why.

[00:06:21] Risa Wechsler: That's exactly right. I mean, we have this wonderful, um, happy fact of physics that comes from general relativity that light has a very specific and fast but finite speed. And so even when we look at the Sun, it, that, that light from the Sun is not emitted right now. It was emitted about eight minutes ago.

[00:06:42] When we look, uh, you know, when we look very far away, we can start to see light that was emitted more than thirteen billion years ago. So, that's why we, uh, when we look far away, uh, we are looking back in time. So, in order to get that third dimension, um, the most common tool that astronomers use is something called spectroscopy.

[00:07:03] So, we essentially have two different kinds of, um, measurements we make. One is basically pictures, imaging. And the other is spectroscopy, where you, uh, where you take maybe a fiber or a slit and you disperse the light as a function of wavelength. So then you get, um, you get the intensity of light as a function of wavelength. That's what astronomers call a spectrum. And because, uh, light that's moving away from you is actually shifted to the red, we measure something that astronomers call a redshift. 

[00:07:34] Russ Altman: This is just like the trains, right? This is what we learned in high school. The train that's going away from you gets lower in sound and the one that's coming towards you has a different change in the sound. And that same thing happens with the lights from the stars. 

[00:07:48] Risa Wechsler: That's exactly right, from stars, or galaxies, or quasars. And so any, so that light gets shifted and then there's some typical features that come from, you know, transitions in elements. Oxygen, for example, has some transitions that, you know, we could even measure in the lab. When we see that at a different wavelength than we see it on earth, we know that it's moving away from us. 

[00:08:11] Russ Altman: Gotcha. 

[00:08:11] Risa Wechsler: And one of the projects that I'm involved in, uh, is called DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. This project has now taken spectra of more than a factor of twenty, uh, than all instruments before. So we now have, I think, forty or fifty million, um, redshifts of galaxies and stars and quasars. And that's a new way to actually make 3D maps and not just 2D maps. So you can't go as deep with that spectroscopy. So we actually do both of these things, uh, together and in concert and we try to put them together. So that we can make really deep 2D maps and then also, uh, these really nice 3D maps as well. 

[00:08:56] Russ Altman: Great, okay. So we have a little bit of a sense of how these measurements and it's great because it's a common, not surprisingly, it's a combination of the images in 2D plus the spectroscopy and you're getting 3D information. But let's get to the fun part. Uh, and I have questions about galaxies, but like, tell me about the universe. Like where are we? So we're in the Milky Way galaxy, if I understand correctly. 

[00:09:18] Risa Wechsler: Yeah.

[00:09:18] Russ Altman: Are we at the edge of the universe? Are we in the middle of it? And what is the shape? Should I think of it as uniform? Like a, just a bunch of points in space, like a fog of clouds or is it a much more interesting non like blob of matter? So paint a picture if you can. And I know this is an incredibly unfair question, but welcome to The Future of Everything. 

[00:09:39] Risa Wechsler: No, it's a great question. Okay. So the first thing you need to know is that the universe is about thirteen point eight billion years old. And the other key thing that you need to know about the universe is, thirteen point eight billion years ago, the universe was very hot, and very dense, and very smooth. And it was definitely smaller than it is today. But we don't have any idea how big it is. And in fact, we don't even know whether it's finite or infinite. So it's a very strange thing, whereas everyone wants to know the answer to your question of where are we in the universe?

[00:10:18] As far as we know, the universe whether or not it's finite or infinite, it is way, way, way, way bigger than the part of the universe that we can see. So, for those purposes, there is no edge, as far as we know, there is no edge, there is no center. Um, we are not at the center except for that we are at the center of our observable universe because we, because, that's we are the observer.

[00:10:46] Russ Altman: Right, right.

[00:10:47] Risa Wechsler: And so we can see in a sphere around us, that's thirteen point eight billion light years away, that's what, that's the universe we can see. And we call that the observable universe. That's essentially the edge of, um, how far light could have traveled to us. 

[00:11:06] Russ Altman: Yup.

[00:11:06] Risa Wechsler: From the beginning of the universe. 

[00:11:08] Russ Altman: But importantly, we do see no matter what direction we look, do we see stuff? Because that means conceptually, we're not at least conceptually, it seems to me at an edge. If we can look in every direction and see something. 

[00:11:20] Risa Wechsler: That's right. And you asked if it was the same in all directions. And the answer to that question is it depends on the scale. So if I look it to, so on large scales, the answer is yes. Incredibly precisely the same in all directions. There is stuff in all directions and it is essentially the same, actually more than you would even expect. On small scales it's different. The universe is very, very clumpy on small scales because we had a process in the early universe, which we think actually came from quantum fluctuations, which created little parts where the universe was a tiny bit denser and little parts where the universe was a tiny bit less dense.

[00:12:01] And most of what has been happening over the last thirteen point eight billion years, is those places that had a little bit of extra stuff to begin with, got a lot more stuff now. And so any place that you're in a galaxy is a place that started with a little bit more stuff and eventually collapsed into a galaxy. 

[00:12:19] Russ Altman: Well, let's go to galaxies.

[00:12:22] Risa Wechsler: Great. 

[00:12:23] Russ Altman: Tell me about a galaxy. I know you study galaxy formation. You said already that you study galaxy evolution. Talk to me about galaxies. 

[00:12:31] Risa Wechsler: Yeah, so okay. Most of the universe is not made of the same stuff that we are or the same stuff that galaxies are, which is mostly stars and gas, mostly hydrogen gas. Most of the universe is actually made of dark matter and I'm sure we'll get back to that. But what you can think of is that in the early universe there was dark matter and there was hydrogen and a little bit of helium.

[00:12:56] Russ Altman: Okay.

[00:12:57] Risa Wechsler: And they were pretty much evenly distributed with a little bit of these tiny fluctuations that were created early on. The key thing that's different between dark matter and normal matter. And I'm getting into dark matter because we actually have to understand dark matter to understand galaxy formations. 

[00:13:16] Russ Altman: You just talked about a dark matter survey or something a few minutes ago, so clearly it's on your mind. 

[00:13:23] Risa Wechsler: We're going to get back to that. Um, so the key difference is that gas, when gas particles hit each other, they cool down, they lose energy. They can, you know, they can emit energy and cool down. That doesn't happen with dark matter as far as we understand. So you have a clump of stuff, which is both dark matter, and gas and eventually the gas particles sink to the center of that clump of stuff. And once they sink to the center they can start to cool and they can start to form galaxies.

[00:13:55] This process happens really early on as we now actually have new images from the James Webb Space Telescope that are further back in time than we've ever seen before and we know that we're starting to form galaxies already in the first basically a hundred, few hundred million years of the universe.

[00:14:16] So that's when it starts, but it happens in this, um, sort of hierarchical process where you start with only the most dense regions of the universe that can start to form galaxies. And then over time, more and more regions, uh, get collapsed enough that they can start to form stars and they merge together and grow over time so that every single galaxy, like the Milky Way, is actually comes from the merger of hundreds of smaller things over the last thirteen point, thirteen billion years or so.

[00:14:49] Russ Altman: And it sounds like you've created a typology of galaxies because I'm looking through your work, I see mentions of satellite galaxies, dwarf galaxies, lots of different kinds of galaxies. I don't know if these are ones that you should tell us about. But it's interesting to me because it sounds like that evolution that you just described, that formation and evolution can take different paths.

[00:15:11] Risa Wechsler: Yeah. Well, so the way I think about this is actually fundamentally, I told you in the beginning that what I want to do most of all is put observations of galaxies into sort of like a unified framework of how we understand how the whole universe formed. So there are lots of experts who think specifically about one type of galaxy or another type of galaxy. That's not me. I like to think about all galaxies at the same time. Although I do have a sweet spot in my heart for these tiny, tiny galaxies, um, that we might talk about later. So galaxies can, um, so they form in these clumps of dark matter. The masses of the dark matter clumps that they form in are everywhere from maybe a few hundred million times the mass of the Sun, um, all the way up to ten to the fifteen times the mass of the Sun.

[00:16:03] Russ Altman: Okay, so that's a huge range. 

[00:16:05] Risa Wechsler: So yeah, like a trillion times, right? So it's a, it's like seven orders of magnitude that you actually, are the dark matter clumps that you can form a galaxy. And so because of that, basically because it's a very wide mass scale and the gas processes are different over that mass scale, you get galaxies that look different.

[00:16:28] You can think of them as forming in different environments. Some, it's like some galaxies you can imagine forming in dense places like cities and some galaxies, you know, form out in the countryside where there's not a lot of stuff around. Those are the kinds of things that can lead to differences in what galaxies look like.

[00:16:45] Now, this thing about satellite galaxies is an important piece because what I mentioned is that the way galaxies form is that they start in these initial density peaks and they merge and grow over time. They merge and grow, it's like, you know, it's like the Sun rotating or the earth rotating around the Sun or even the Moon, uh, you know, circling the earth, galaxies have satellites similar to that. And they, they kind of come in and they get accreted, and they eventually get destroyed and merge into the main thing, but that takes quite a bit of time. 

[00:17:20] Russ Altman: But also, so many of the principles, if I'm understanding, many of the principles of gravity apply even at the scale so that if you have a big galaxy and there's a little one and if it's close enough, it might, and forgive my language, it might start circulating around that big gallery, galaxy in some sense.

[00:17:36] Risa Wechsler: That's right. And actually, this is the amazing thing about gravity. I mean, gravity is a theory that we understand incredibly well. It is the only thing that matters on very large scales in the universe. Uh, you know, Einstein wrote down a theory, general relativity. It still seems to work on every single scale we have possibly tested it. And that literally means including on the scale of the whole universe. So when I am mostly thinking about how dark matter and galaxies behave in the universe, for me personally, because of the scales that I'm interested, in relatively large scales, gravity is the main thing that matters for everything.

[00:18:14] And we know how it works. It's, it turns out to be hard to calculate because as you heard, we're calculating things on a very wide range of scales. 

[00:18:24] Russ Altman: Right, right.

[00:18:25] Risa Wechsler: All the way from, you know, the details of exactly how the Milky Way forms to, you know, how a trillion galaxies formed in the universe. Um, so it's a complicated computational problem, but conceptually it's just the same gravity that, you know, is why you're sitting in your chair.

[00:18:43] Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. We'll have more with Risa Wechsler next.

[00:18:56] Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm your host, Russ Altman, and we're speaking with Professor Risa Wechsler about physics, astrophysics, the edges of the universe, and where galaxies come from. 

[00:19:08] In the next segment, Risa will tell us about dark matter, dark energy, and how she and her colleagues are measuring these things to get a better understanding of how fast the universe is accelerating in its growth.

[00:19:22] But Risa, one of the things you mentioned that we didn't get into a little bit was dark energy and dark matter, and it sounds like that's quite fundamental. So can you take us through what we need to know about that to appreciate our evolving understanding of the universe? 

[00:19:36] Risa Wechsler: Yeah, great. Okay, so the first thing, um, I am really interested in this basic question, what is the universe made of?

[00:19:44] Okay. And the first thing you need to know about the answer to that question is that most of the universe is made of different stuff than you and me, right? You and me are made of hydrogen and carbon and oxygen and other things like that. Everything on the periodic table, all of the things that you and me and the Sun and the stars are made of.

[00:20:03] Russ Altman: The entire chemistry AP exam. 

[00:20:06] Risa Wechsler: All of chemistry AP, and in fact, all of the standard model of particle physics is all less than five percent of what the universe is made of. So, we now know that there are these two other things, um, dark matter, we think is matter, but it's matter, so it behaves exactly the same gravitationally as normal matter does, as far as we have seen.

[00:20:32] And we can see its impact gravitationally on everything from the tiniest galaxies in the universe to how the entire universe as a whole moves and changes over time. But as far as we know, it's a particle and we don't know what this particle is. So we're looking for it, but we're looking for, it might be really, really small. It might be ten to the minus twenty-one times smaller than an electron, or it might be, you know, a thousand times the mass of the Sun. That's a very big mass range. 

[00:21:04] Russ Altman: Right. 

[00:21:04] Risa Wechsler: We don't know what it is and we're looking. 

[00:21:06] Russ Altman: Do we know if it's in our presence or is it out there somewhere? 

[00:21:09] Risa Wechsler: No, it's everywhere. It's everywhere and it is actually, it doesn't interact with us. So it's probably going through you and me because we are, you know, the earth is spinning around the Sun and the Sun is spinning around the Milky Way. So we actually are moving through the galaxy, um, as we speak. 

[00:21:27] Russ Altman: Okay. 

[00:21:27] Risa Wechsler: Through this wind of dark matter. So that's the dark matter, but um, then there's this other thing that's even stranger, which is not even matter at all. And we call that thing dark energy. It's kind of just a funny name. Uh, we don't know what it is, but what we do know is, we know how much there is, and we know what it's doing to the universe. So dark energy basically does two things. It changes the way the universe expands over time. And it changes, along with dark matter, they both change how structure grows, so how small things become big.

[00:22:00] And so we actually, even though we don't know what this thing is, it has an impact on the universe on very, very large scales. And so that's one of the reasons that we're making these very big maps, to figure out what dark energy and dark matter are. 

[00:22:17] Russ Altman: Okay, great. So you've described for us a little bit about dark matter, a little bit about dark energy. How does this, how do you use these concepts for doing what you really have said now a couple of times you're interested in, which is understanding and mapping the universe? 

[00:22:32] Risa Wechsler: Yeah, so these maps of the universe are actually really sensitive to both dark matter and dark energy. Um, dark energy, even though we don't know what it is, impacts things on large scales in the universe.

[00:22:43] So it impacts how the universe evolves over time. It impacts it in two ways. One is how fast the universe expands, and the other is how fast it gets clumpy. And so by making these maps that I told you about, we're actually separately able to map out how fast is the universe clumping up? How fast is gravity working? And how fast is it speeding apart? It actually turns out the universe is not just expanding, it's actually accelerating. And that is the key reason that we know that dark energy is a thing. It's probably like a property of the vacuum itself that kind of pushes one bit of space away from another bit of space.

[00:23:22] So we know it's accelerating, we don't know why, and we want to measure how fast as well as we possibly can. So that's dark energy. Now, dark matter is, it, so it does impact how fast the universe expands and how fast it gets clumpy. But it also, because it's a, probably a small thing, can do all kinds of other things.

[00:23:43] We want to actually understand what's the mass of the dark matter particle, and also how it interacts. And, we have lots of ways to do that, actually, some of my colleagues here at Stanford and SLAC are trying to build experiments deep underground to try to catch dark matter in the act, and see if it actually interacts with us.

[00:24:02] What I'm personally doing is trying to understand how dark matter behaves, on the scale both of the whole universe and on the scale of individual galaxies because it turns out that what dark matter is, like actually what particle it is, can influence things like how many galaxies there are, um, how clumpy they are, how they behave, how they move.

[00:24:26] And so, um, one of the ways I've been thinking about that recently is there's another kind of map we make, which is actually a very precise map of the Milky Way itself. And there are some things that we can only measure in the Milky Way, including the tiniest galaxies in the universe, which these small ones are like only a few hundred stars. And the way they move actually is very sensitive to what the dark matter particle is. So that's a new tool we have to learn about what that is. 

[00:24:57] Russ Altman: Great. So now you had mentioned this Saga survey, and you had so much excitement that I want to make sure I ask you about it and why we, all need to be excited about it.

[00:25:07] Risa Wechsler: Yeah, so, big picture, we live in the Milky Way, and I already mentioned to you that there's some, many things that we can only measure at high precision in the Milky Way. But of course, the Milky Way is one galaxy, and it's one of probably a trillion galaxies in the universe. So every time we measure one thing really precisely, we always want to know, how does it fit in? How does it fit into everything else we know? So actually, about fifteen years ago, um, a colleague of mine, Marla Geha at Yale, uh, we were thinking, we were very frustrated by how often it was that people were comparing models of all the galaxies that look like the Milky Way with this one galaxy, the Milky Way.

[00:25:50] So we thought, okay, well, let's find a hundred of them. And that was a kind of ambitious plan at the time. The thing we were interested in specifically is, I mean, we'd like to know everything about these hundred galaxies that are similar to the Milky Way. What we specifically targeted was their satellite galaxies, their bright satellite galaxies.

[00:26:09] In the Milky Way, we actually know right now of almost sixty galaxies that are orbiting our own galaxy. But some of them are so tiny that you can only see them even very nearby. You can't even see them at the edge of the Milky Way. So here, what we wanted to do was find the satellite galaxies around these hundred Milky Way like systems.

[00:26:29] So we actually, it was quite an ambitious project, both theoretically and observationally. But we found, we, we have these hundred systems now, actually a hundred and one. And um, and we have identified almost four hundred satellites that orbit these hundred systems. And so what that does is it helps us understand the context of our home. Everything we measure about the Milky Way we can now put into context with these hundred other systems to understand, you know, how it varies as a function of their formation history. 

[00:27:02] Russ Altman: Right. So instead it's just like so, you know, I sometimes I'm a doctor I sometimes get involved in clinical research and you can give a drug to one patient and it'll work or it won't work But you have no idea if it's actually going to work for everybody else. But if you give me ninety-nine other patients, then I begin to have some idea of what's a normal response and what's abnormal. So it's kind of easy for me to believe that by looking at a hundred, and I'm interested in this idea, you must've had to define what similar meant. 

[00:27:28] Risa Wechsler: Yeah. In this case, we actually just looked at mostly basically how massive it was. And I can take your analogy a little bit further, right? If these hundred people, like, they have different genetics, right? Their parents may have been more or less likely to have had heart disease. 

[00:27:46] Russ Altman: Yes, absolutely. 

[00:27:47] Risa Wechsler: And same thing with these hundred Milky Ways. They have had different formation histories. They were formed in different environments. Some of them essentially were formed in cities and some were formed in the country.

[00:28:01] Some of them actually, you know, um, had a progenitor which was very massive ten billion years ago, and some of them actually just kind of caught up very late. Um, so that's the kind of diversity that we can try to understand and put the Milky Way into context. 

[00:28:16] Russ Altman: So I take it that when you make these measurements, you're seeing the fingerprints of their history in the measurements.

[00:28:22] Risa Wechsler: Exactly. That's exactly right. And that helps us understand the Milky Way, uh, much better. We now know a ton about the Milky Way and it's a really exciting time because we're able to measure, map it much more precisely with the next generation of instruments. And hopefully learn more, not only about galaxy formation, but also about dark matter.

[00:28:42] We sort of know the Milky Way formed a little bit early, but then it had this interesting collision that happened only a bill, one or two billion years ago with a with an object called the Large Magellanic Cloud that was pretty massive and brought in a bunch of its own systems with it. And so that turns out to be a really important thing for understanding all of the details that we can only measure in our own system.

[00:29:04] Russ Altman: So I have to ask, because when I was a kid, I loved, I had a telescope, I did astronomy. The Andromeda Galaxy was the only one I could ever find. Is that one of the hundred that you're looking at? 

[00:29:14] Risa Wechsler: No. And there's a reason it's not, it's so close that we actually can't see most of the whole, you know, region around Andromeda. So we actually have to go far enough away that we can see the whole system. 

[00:29:29] Russ Altman: Thanks to Risa Wechsler. That was The Future of the Universe. Thanks for tuning in to this episode, too. With more than 250 episodes in our archives, you have instant access to a whole range of fascinating conversations with me and other people.

[00:29:46] If you're enjoying the show, please remember to consider sharing it with friends, family, and colleagues. Personal recommendations are the best way to spread the news about The Future of Everything. You can connect with me on X or Twitter @RBAltman, and you can connect with Stanford Engineering @StanfordENG.

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