- What are environmental problems?
- What are the environmental problems?
- Causes of environmental problems
- How to prevent or fix them
- Environmental problems in Mexico
We explain what environmental problems are and what their causes are. Also, some examples and ways to prevent them.
What are environmental problems?
Environmental problems are the harmful effects on the ecosystem that arise from different human activities, generally as unwanted and more or less accidental consequences.
When this kind of problems They are not corrected in time, they cause an unpredictable change in the environment that, in the long run, usually results in environmental disasters, that is, tragic and catastrophic situations that involve (and come from) the deterioration of the environment. environment.
Environmental problems are one of the main challenges of the industrialized world, whose continuous production of consumer goods It also requires the continuous entry of raw Materials, drawn directly from the nature.
In that sense, the impact that Industrial Revolution and the way of life urban has had on the global ecosystem has meant changes much more vertiginous than in the rest of the history of the humanity.
That is the reason why numerous national organizations and international they fight to push for legislation ecological in most countries and for reaching agreements that make it possible to avoid or at least slow down the pace of environmental deterioration as a consequence of our way of life.
What are the environmental problems?
There are many forms of environmental problems, some with a greater impact on the environment, which makes them urgent to address, and others, on the other hand, more innocuous and simple. The main ones today would have to be:
- Deforestation. This is understood as the indiscriminate felling of woods and green areas to use your wood in various industries (paper, wood, etc.) or to allocate the soil to agricultural or livestock activities. This process, which humanity started prehistoric In its own way, it has never occurred at such a fierce rate as it is today, so much so that replanting forests is imperative to create a counterweight. The absence of trees deteriorates the I usually, leaves you exposed to erosion, decreases the amount of oxygen in the world and increases that of atmospheric carbon, helping to increase the temperature average of our planet.
- Pollution. It refers to the adulteration of Water, Earth or air by adding chemically reactive substances, capable of destroying ecosystems, making water unusable or generating diseases in both human beings and others life forms. This problem is one of the most serious, since it also entails destructive phenomena such as acid rain (polluted rain), the toxic accumulation of plastic or the acidification of seas, for example. All this translates into too rapid chemical changes, which do not allow life to adapt to them, or to remedy them in its own way.
- Global warming. The planet is getting hotter and hotter, at a much faster rate than it had in the past, and the logician is responsible for this. human being. Most industrial activities, from livestock to burning fossil fuels, flood the atmosphere with carbon derivatives (carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide), which not only impoverish the quality of the air, but also remain in the atmosphere, preventing the normal release of heat, and thus generating a greenhouse effect which is already melting the perpetual snows of the poles and raising the water level. This translates into climatic changes of intensity, creation of new deserts, floods and the destruction of the planet's meteorological balance.
- waste of biodiversity. The extinction of numerous species, due to the destruction of your habitat or to the contamination of the same, or to the interference of the human being in their Trophic chains, leads to imbalances in biological circuits that can become critical for the world. For example, the gradual but constant disappearance of bees it is leaving plants without pollinators, which would translate into loss of genetic variety and impoverishment of plant species.
Causes of environmental problems
The causes of most environmental problems are summarized in human industrial activity. Among them are the factories and their solid, liquid and gaseous chemical waste, the burning of fossil fuels to obtain Energy or boost our vehicles.
In addition, it has great environmental impact The constant dumping of biological waste in water and other activities that make up our day to day, have been adulterating the world in which we live for almost two centuries. The consequences of this could be just around the corner.
How to prevent or fix them
There is no simple and straightforward method of solving environmental problems, or even preventing them. But everything points to a model of sustainable development, that does not conceive of natural resources as if they were an infinite source.
In addition, investment is necessary in promoting activities that compensate for the ecological damage done. Thus, it would be possible to minimize our main environmental problems. Some important specific measures would be:
- Stop producing plastics single use, with which we are flooding the seas.
- Do not waste the electric power, whose production generally involves burning fossil fuels.
- Recycle the daily materials that would otherwise go to nature.
- Provide an adequate disposal of hazardous chemical waste and be strict in the anti-pollution policies of large industries and manufacturers.
- Reduce the use of automobiles and invest capital in the search and development of technologies eco-friendly.
- Implement in our countries a control of the birth rate.
Environmental problems in Mexico
In Mexico, as in many countries, there are important environmental problems that deteriorate the quality of life of its inhabitants. The main of them are:
- Air pollution. Since 1992, Mexico City has been declared by the UN as the most polluted in the world, due to gases generated by the automobile fleet and by large industries. This exposes the citizens and the surrounding animal life at very high levels of carcinogenic and toxic elements such as cadmium, carbon oxides or the frequent cases of acid rain.
- Deforestation. According to the Institute of Geography of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico loses about 500 thousand hectares of forests annually, which makes Mexico the fifth country in the world that destroys its jungles and forests the fastest.
- Chemical contamination of water. Chemical spills into water are a major problem in Mexico, due to lax state control and the proliferation of large industries. In August 2014, only about 40 thousand liters of sulfuric acid, a highly lethal and corrosive organic compound, the same month that there was a famous oil spill in Río Hondo, Veracruz, the predecessor of the one that later occurred in San Juan, Nuevo León.
- Sargassum overpopulation. In the beach regions of southern Mexico, specifically in the Yucatan peninsula, the accumulation of the algae called sargassum has become a problem tourist Y ecological. These algae have proliferated in a disorderly way in the sea, in such a way that they compete with each other and impoverish the marine waters, to end up dying and being washed ashore by the waves. There the once crystalline waters of the Mexican Caribbean decompose and muddy.