Here is the perspective of National Geographic.
Due to geography, climate, engineering, regulation, and competition for resources, some regions seem relatively flush with freshwater, while others face drought and debilitating pollution. In much of the developing world, clean water is either hard to come by or a commodity that requires laborious work or significant currency to obtain.
Wherever they are, people need water to survive. Not only is the human body 60 percent water, the resource is also essential for producing food, clothing, and computers, moving our waste stream, and keeping us and the environment healthy.
Unfortunately, humans have proved to be inefficient water users. (The average hamburger takes 2,400 liters, or 630 gallons, of water to produce, and many water-intensive crops, such as cotton, are grown in arid regions.)
According to the United Nations, water use has grown at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century. By 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity, with two-thirds of the world's population living in water-stressed regions as a result of use, growth, and climate change. The challenge we now face as we head into the future is how to effectively conserve, manage, and distribute the water we have.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/freshwater-crisis/ 7/26/19
Farmland
Like fresh water, land that can be farmed is a finite resource. Here is a projection of how much is and will be used for crops and grazing.
https://ourworldindata.org/yields-and-land-use-in-agriculture 7/26/19
By 2050, I recon most would agree that the world’s population will stabilize. Of course I am concerned that it will be in the process of collapsing, but for now it is growing. And more land is being used to produce food. Of course crop yields are increasing, to the same amount of land will mean more food per person if both numbers are constant. But how long yield increases can continue is problematic, and until everybody has the kind of food availability the US enjoys, many people will have reason to be less than content. Of course, if land starts to degrade on average, then things do not look so nice.
Wetlands
Here the news is not good:
A wetland forest at the Danau Sentarum National Park on Indonesian Borneo island. An alarming 50% of the world's wetlands have been destroyed in the last 100 years, threatening human welfare at a time of increasing water scarcity, a new report said.
An alarming 50 percent of the world's wetlands have been destroyed in the last 100 years, threatening human welfare at a time of increasing water scarcity, a new report said.
Wetlands serve as a source of drinking water and provide protection against floods and storms, yet they have been decimated to make space for housing, factories and farms or damaged by unsustainable water use and pollution.
"In just over 100 years we have managed to destroy 50 percent of the world's wetlands," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme.
"It is a startling figure," he said at a UN conference in Hyderabad.
The report, compiled by an ongoing research project entitled TEEB, or The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, said coastal wetland losses in some regions, including Asia, have been happening at a rate of 1.6 percent per year.
Graphic showing monetary values assigned to different types of wetland ecosystemts by The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity. Fifty percent of the world's wetlands have been destroyed in the last 100 years, a new report said.
"Taking mangroves as an example, 20 per cent (3.6 million hectares) of total coverage has been lost since 1980, with recent rates of loss of up to one percent per year," said the report released Tuesday.
"We need wetlands because our existence, our food and our water is at stake," said Ritesh Kumar of the environmental group Wetlands International.
Wetlands are known to cover about 13 million square kilometres (five million square miles) of the Earth's surface, and are a natural sink for Earth-warming carbon dioxide, act as fish nurseries and are important tourist attractions.
In the United States alone, wetlands are estimated to provide $23 billion worth of storm protection every year, the report said.
The report was released at a conference of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, where environment ministers will hold three days of talks from Wednesday to try and raise funds to stop the decline of Earth's natural resources.
https://phys.org/news/2012-10-wetlands.html 7/26/19
Speaking of wetlands, I have a house on the water, but there is a seawall. There is no wetland, just a dead concrete drop from lawn to seawater. This supports very little interesting life. Some time after I moved in, the part of the yard next the seawall began to get very marshy. I poked around and found there were some natural springs. I’m on a hill that predated the wall. Someone had decided this was a drainage problem and had placed an enormous amount of plastic fabric to try to coax the water down and let it drain through a PVC pipe through the wall.
Eventually a visible spring surfaced pouring water out of the ground. Delighted, I decided to make a little pond for it to drain into and then a little channel to direct it down to the wall and over. I hired a man to dig the pond, and his first act was to drive a stake right into the spring, breaking through the clay below and dumping it all; the visible spring has never recurred. So I hired another guy, who dug the pond and made arrangement to catch the drainage and send it on its way as planned.
Well that worked and the bog dried out. Then I noticed that there was a patch of green plants growing where the water fell. I thought this was a great idea. There are endless miles of seawall. If people would dig ponds, direct the water from their roof drain pipes into the ponds and then spill them into the canals, we could transform the endless desert below seawalls into vigorous life. So I called the Southwest Florida Water Management Department, Swift Mud, and tried to explain my thrilling news. All I did was get people furious with me. This is a pattern I have found many times.
You could go further. Pull up a barge planted to turn it into a tiny wetland and spout the water into that. If everybody did it, status symbol or tax break, and if you excluded fishing except for the owner and guests fishing from his own barge (include a sun shelter and chairs), we could bring the canals to teaming life and provide some of the services wetlands offer … maybe … just a thought.
Fish catches
The importance of fish to human nutrition is so obviously important that it draws serious attention. That is good. Just following the efforts would be a career. Here is a sample:
BLUE GROWTH IN ACTION “Blue growth” is an innovative, integrated and multisectoral approach to the management of aquatic resources aimed at maximizing the ecosystem goods and services obtained from the use of oceans, inland waters and wetlands, while also providing social and economic benefits. Its objective is coordinated management resulting in inclusive growth that contributes to the three pillars of sustainable development (social, economic and environmental) and the alleviation of poverty, hunger and malnutrition (Burgess et al., 2018). Blue growth is anchored in the principle that ecosystem services provided by aquatic ecosystems are fundamental to human wellbeing – to the air we breathe, the food we consume, and the water we drink and use to grow food. Marine ecosystem services in particular provide more than 60 percent of the economic value of the global biosphere (Martinez et al., 2007). Recognizing this value, the global community has been focusing more and more effort on the development of economic capacity to exploit aquatic ecosystems, and the services they provide, in a sustainable manner. The use of an ecosystem for economic returns and social benefits must, however, take place in a way that minimizes environmental degradation. If an ecosystem and its services are not maintained, or in some cases restored, the natural capital is eroded and the system will not succeed; it will thus not contribute to improved food security and livelihoods or to achieving many SDG goals and targets. Ecosystem services are generally divided into four categories (Box 25). While provisioning services provide direct inputs into a blue economy (e.g. fish, water, plants), regulating and supporting services are just as crucial, as they provide for healthy aquatic ecosystems that support the economic activities associated with provisioning services (Lillebø et al., 2017). Equally important to blue growth are the cultural services that aquatic ecosystems provide, including tourism and educational opportunities as well as the cultural significance of the ecosystems for many coastal communities (Rodrigues and Kruse, 2017). Therefore, in the context of blue growth, aquatic resource management needs to consider and balance the importance and use of ecosystem services across all four categories. Achieving this balance is especially vital as the global community strives to achieve the SDG goals and targets – especially SDG 14 on oceans – and to ensure the long-term sustainability of aquatic ecosystem use. An example of this balance is provided by Bann and Başak (2011), who estimated the economic value of Gökova Turkey Special Environmental Protection Area in Turkey at around USD 31.2 million per year. This value incorporates provisioning services (fish and salt marsh succulents for food), regulating services (carbon sequestration, erosion protection and waste treatment) and cultural services (tourism and recreation). The most economically significant of these services in the area is tourism and recreation, which accounts for approximately 55 percent of the total economic value, highlighting the need to manage the tourism industry sustainably. Restoring habitat and preserving biodiversity can help to improve aquatic ecosystem services and provide numerous benefits in terms of food, revenue and jobs. For example, in Viet Nam, mangrove replanting by volunteers at the cost of USD 1.1 million saved USD 7.3 million annual PART 4 OUTLOOK AND EMERGING ISSUES | 166 | THE STATE OF WORLD FISHERIES AND AQUACULTURE 2018 Provisioning Food (e.g. wild capture fisheries, aquaculture, drinking-water, marine salt) Raw materials (e.g. alginate industry, fish skin for fashion goods, sand, gravel) Biochemical and medical resources (e.g. fish skin for treatment of open wounds) Energy (e.g. macro- and microalgae, wind, wave and solar energy, oil and gas) Regulating Biological control (e.g. herbivorous fish control of aquatic weeds, waste treatment) Regulation of water flow (e.g. protection by sand and mud flats, minimization of wind erosion from dunes and cliffs) Climate regulation (e.g. carbon sequestration and storage) Moderation of extreme events (e.g. protection of coastal infrastructure by mangroves and coral reefs) Supporting Maintenance of life cycles (e.g. nursery grounds for target species and prey) Maintenance of genetic diversity Cultural Recreation and tourism (e.g. recreational fishing, ecotourism, boating) Cognitive development (e.g. scientific advancement, educational enrichment) Inspiration for culture, art and design (e.g. role of fishing in a community’s culture) Aesthetic value (e.g. peace felt from viewing the ocean) Spiritual experience (e.g. sense of place, spiritual interactions) http://www.fao.org/3/i9540EN/i9540en.pdf
Sand
Yep, we are even facing a sand crisis.
If you're planning a beach vacation, you'd better get to it soon. An alarming statistic for you: 67% of Southern California beaches? GONE by 2100. All because of sand. Even if you don't think about the grainy stuff, you use it daily. You're reading this off something made with sand, looking at it through a screen made with sand, surrounded by buildings made with concrete. I could let you guess what's in concrete, but I suspect you're already catching onto a theme here. The following is a transcript of the video.
I'll try to make this quick since we don't have a lot of time. The world is running out of sand.
Crazy right? We literally have tons of it on beaches, deserts, and under the ocean, but we're using it up faster than the planet can make it.
We use sand way more than you'd expect. Worldwide, we go through 50 billion tons of sand every year. That is twice the amount produced by every river in the world.
After air and water, sand is our most used natural resource. We use it even more than oil.
It's used to make food, wine, toothpaste, glass, computer chips, breast implants, cosmetics, paper, paint, plastics.
So where does it all come from? Well, let's ask Vince Beiser! He wrote a book on the subject, called The World in a Grain.
Vince Beiser: "So the sand that we use, is what you call 'marine sand.' It's the sand that you find at the bottom of rivers, and on beaches and at the bottom of lakes and oceans."
I know what you're thinking, and no, we can't use sand from the desert. Wind erosion makes the grains too round for most purposes. We need angular sand that interlocks like pieces to a puzzle. Like the sand generated from mountain rocks, pelted by rain, wind, and rivers for over 25 thousand years.
The major player for sand usage is concrete. Okay, just to clarify: cement is the lime and clay based glue that holds everything together, and concrete is the finished product that you walk on, drive on, and live inside.
Concrete is made of 10% cement (lime and Clay) 15% water and -yup: 75% sand. The concrete required to build a house takes on average 200 tons of sand, a hospital uses 3,000 tons, and a mile of a highway requires 15,000 tons.
It makes sense that the world makes over 4 billion tons of concrete annually. We need more every year. The number and size of our cities is exploding, especially in the developing world.
This change is most noticeable in China, now home to the largest urban area in the world, the Pearl River Delta. Between 42 and 60 million people call the delta home. China now has 102 cities with a population of over a million. Europe has 38. For all those new cities, they need a lot of concrete.
Between 2011 and 2013, China used more concrete than the US did in the entire 20th century. Again: in Three years, China built the equivalent to every highway, road bridge in the US. And the Hoover Dam
So it's not outrageous to hear that China also outpaces the world in cement production. By a LOT: 2500 metric tons a year.
All that cement is going to need a lot of sand to make concrete. Most of it comes from dredging Poyang Lake. An estimated 236 cubic metes of sand are taken from it every year, making it the largest single sand mine in the world.
But concrete isn't the only use for sand. China is also using tons of sand to build up islands in the South China Sea, expanding its foothold in the region.
And China's not the only nation building islands from nothing. You've seen these before. The Palm Islands and The World were major island building projects in Dubai, and required 186.5 million meters of sand. This depleted the sea floor around the United Arab Emirates, leaving importing sand from Australia as the only option when constructing the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa.
It's no surprise then that the sand extraction is a $70 billion industry.
Vince Beiser: "The easiest, cheapest and best quality sand actually comes from riverbeds. It's very easy to get, you just send a boat out into the middle of a river, with a big suction pump on it. Its basically like a big straw that you drop down to the bottom of the river, suck all that sand up off the bottom."
Problem Solved? Nope! The ocean floor isn't miles of sand deep. It's a thin layer over rock, and that layer is home to microorganisms, which feed the base of the food chain. Collecting that sand disrupts fishing in the area and the landscape on shore. When removing sand from the seabed, the shore above water slides into the valley to even itself out. This still leaves shore communities open to flooding and erosion.
Vince Beiser: "The recent floods in Houston were actually made worse by sand mining in the San Jacinto River. The San Jacinto is one of the rivers that borders Houston. It's also an excellent source of sand. It has been mined very heavily for sand for the past ten, twenty years."
Up to 90% of the world's beaches have shrunk an average of 40 meters since 2008. If you haven't noticed a change in your favorite beach, you're not alone. Popular shores replenish their dying beaches with even more sand, imported from elsewhere. And if we keep it up: Almost 70% of Southern California's spectacular beaches could be completely eroded by 2100.
Governments worldwide have begun to regulate and restrict sand mining and concrete production. Now Problem solved, right? Actually, It's caused an entirely new problem: The Black Market of Sand Illegal sand mining has lead to the rise of the Sand Mafia, India's strongest criminal organization.
This interconnected group of businessmen, drivers and criminals use their influence, and if that fails, violence and murder to keep the sand flowing illegal sand generates $2.3 billion a year, employing 75,000 of India's impoverished to dive for sand in rivers. Divers work 12-hour days, diving up to 200 times and making only $15 a boatload. Many suffer from bleeding ears and headaches. Deaths and drownings go unreported.
Worldwide, illegal sand mining has destroyed entire islands. Two dozen Indonesian islands have disappeared around the same time Singapore imported 17 million tons for it's massive 50-mile land expansion. It wasn't until 2010 that dozens of Malaysian officials were charged with accepting bribes and sexual favors for importing the illegal sand.
Vince Beiser: "The first thing that we're going to see in this country, the sort-of canary in the coal mine, that will really let us know that things are starting to get bad, is prices. I believe this is one of the reasons that housing prices have gone up so much, in pretty much all of America's big cities, because the price of sand has about quintupled in the past 30-40 years. And that's one of the critical inputs whenever you're building a house, of course, is sand for the concrete."
We do have some alternatives. While crushing rocks and recycled concrete is expensive, it can be used to create concrete-quality sand. Glass bottles can be ground to make 'recycled glass sand' to replenish beaches. Yes, it's totally safe, and no, it won't cut you.
Finally, UN Environmental Program suggests better pricing and taxing on sand mining to encourage these alternatives. They also recommend an immediate need for creating regulations in all countries, as well as international waters.
Vince Beiser: "The questions isn't 'how can we use less sand?', it's 'How can we use less everything?' Trees, water, fish, we're overusing all of those things, and sand is just another thing we should be adding to the list. Well, we're on track to be a planet of at least 9 billion people in the next 20 years. Most of them are going to want to consume resources the way we do in the Western world, and that is just physically impossible."
If we want to enjoy these things, while still enjoying this thing, we need to protect this thing, before we run out of time.
Is it just I, or are you suspecting that a disproportionate amount of that sand is being used by the super-rich to build themselves bunkers in which to hide from us after they precipitate the apocalypse?
CO2
I suppose we can all agree that we have the wrong level of CO2 in the atmosphere. There is massively more of the gas than there was when we started burning fossil fuels in large amount. Some people will assure you that this will lead to global warming since heat defuses more slowly through CO2. I’m not so sure. I’ve mentioned that convection goes orders of magnitude faster than diffusion. Heat rises … remember? CO2 holds more heat than N2, so I would expect CO2 should be cooling the planet. I shall be uncomfortable with the issue until some expert reassures me.
Vapor trails
One idea of how to save us from global warming is to put opaque stuff up there in the stratosphere. We shall rejoice in the shade. Except there is this thing called the lapse rate. Heat rises … did I mention that? It’s colder up there because air expands and cools as it rises. If you were to opacify the stratosphere the temperature up there would be pretty close to the balance between sunlight and the cold of space, call it 70%. The lapse rate means we would cook in our tracks. Or so it seems to me. I await some high ranking, high paid “scientist” to address the issue. All I can say is that they just recently noticed that the vapor trails jets leave warm us rather than cooling us. I doubt you have much luck getting the global warming warriors to stop flying around in jets.
Trees
Yes, we are running out of trees. I’m sure you youngsters out there don’t remember when a forest meant a lot of big trees. What forests we have nowadays are spindly little trees. Watch a movie set in earlier times; they can’t even find enough big trees to make a movie set. So loss of forests is worse than deforestation alone. Deforestation receives attention.
Forest on Borneo in Indonesia, cut down for an oil palm plantation
JAMI TARRIS/MINDEN PICTURES
By Erik StokstadSep. 13, 2018 , 3:30 PM
The finding is “a really big deal,” says tropical ecologist Daniel Nepstad, director of the Earth Innovation Institute, an environmental nonprofit in San Francisco, California, because it suggests that corporate commitments alone are not going to adequately protect forests from expanding agriculture.
Researchers already had a detailed global picture of forest loss and regrowth. In 2013, a team led by Matthew Hansen, a remote-sensing expert at the University of Maryland in College Park, published high-resolution maps of forest change between 2000 and 2012 from satellite imagery. But the maps, available online, didn’t reveal where deforestation—the permanent loss of forest—was taking place.
For the new analysis, Philip Curtis, a geospatial analyst working with The Sustainability Consortium, a nonprofit headquartered in Fayetteville, Arkansas, trained a computer program to recognize five causes of forest loss in satellite images: wildfire, logging of tree plantations, large-scale agriculture, small-scale agriculture, and urbanization. To teach the software, Curtis spent weeks staring at thousands of images from Google Earth that showed deforestation with a known cause. “It was some of the most distressing part of the work,” he says, especially when looking at Southeast Asia. “The scale of the loss was staggering.”
The program’s decisions were based on mathematical properties of the images, which can help distinguish the larger blocky shapes of industrial agriculture from the smaller, irregular fields in shifting subsistence farming, for example. All told, about 27% of the total loss between 2001 and 2015 was due to large-scale farming and ranching, Curtis and his colleagues report today in Science. Such farming includes industrial plantations for palm oil, a valuable biofuel and a major ingredient in food, cosmetics, and other products. Forest cleared for those plantations is gone for good, whereas forest cleared for other purposes, including small-scale farming, typically grows back. (Urbanization, also a permanent conversion, made up just 1% of the total loss of forest.)
Deforestation from commodity-driven agriculture held steady between 2001 and 2015, the span of the analysis. But the trends vary by region. In Brazil, large swaths of Amazonian forest have been cut down for cattle ranches or soybean farms. The good news is that the rate of deforestation there fell by half between 2004 and 2009, because of enforcement of environmental laws, pressure from purchasers of soybeans, and other factors. But in Malaysia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, laws against deforestation are often lacking or poorly enforced, and ever more forests have been cut down for palm oil plantations. “We’ve known this [was happening], but we didn’t have the numbers to show it consistently across the globe,” Curtis says.
The trees that fall
Forest destruction has declined in Brazil, but it has been increasing in southeast Asia.
ADAPTED FROM CURTIS ET AL., SCIENCE, VOL 342, ISSUE 6160, PAGE 850
Nepstad says that despite the success of corporate commitments slowing deforestation in the Amazon, the larger picture is disheartening. Many companies have pledged to support “zero-deforestation” by not purchasing palm oil or other major commodities from plantations or farms that were recently cleared of forest. But out of 473 such pledges the Earth Innovation Institute recently analyzed, just 155 actually set targets of zero deforestation from their supply chains by 2020. Only 49 companies have reported making good progress.
“The corporate commitments have been difficult to implement, and some companies just don’t want to do much,” Nepstad says. Lisa Rausch, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, notes that it can be a challenge for companies to find suppliers with verifiable sources of zero-deforestation commodities. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/scientists-reveal-how-much-world-s-forests-being-destroyed-industrial-agriculture
Gas, oil and coal
Maybe you have wondered about how long we have fossil fuel for.
After all, she argued, at current rates of production, oil will run out in 53 years, natural gas in 54, and coal in 110. We have managed to deplete these fossil fuels – which have their origins somewhere between 541 and 66 million years ago – in less than 200 years since we started using them.Sep 23, 2015
I think I have a way of getting plenty of light, cheap, clean, safe energy, but nobody is asking me. Besides, kinship and fertility are more important and more pressing.
Desert
Yes, we are losing land to desert.
Desertification poses one of the greatest environmental challenges today and constitutes a major barrier to meeting basic human needs in drylands.
Desertification is land degradation that affects biological productivity as well as the livelihoods of millions of people. It is caused by a combination of human and natural factors that contribute to an unsustainable use of scarce natural resources.
Some 10 to 20% of drylands are already degraded, and the ongoing desertification threatens the world’s poorest populations. Various scenarios that explore the future of desertification and human well-being in drylands show that global desertified area is likely to increase. Prevention is the most effective way to cope with desertification, because later attempts to rehabilitate desertified areas are costly and tend to deliver limited results. Combating desertification yields multiple local and global benefits and helps fight biodiversity loss and global climate change.
Efforts to reduce pressures on dryland ecosystems need to go hand in hand with efforts to reduce poverty as both are closely linked. Effectively fighting desertification will help reduce global poverty and will contribute to meeting the Millennium Development Goals. More... https://www.greenfacts.org/en/desertification/index.htm 7/26 /19
Amphibians
And amphibians are seriously in decline.
Background. In the past three decades, declines in populations of amphibians (the class of organisms that includes frogs, toads, salamanders, newts, and caecilians) have occurred worldwide. ... Habitat loss, disease and climate change are thought to be responsible for the drastic decline in populations in recent years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_populations 7/26/19
Oh dear, imagine a world without frogs.
Of course, there’s more. Beavers are destructive, invasive species in Tierra del Fuego, the UK and Sweden. Minerals can be pulled off the sea floor, but there are problems: Olive Heffernan “Deep-Sea Dilemma” Nature vol. 571 no. 7766 July 25, 2o19 page 465. “Mining the Ocean Floor Could Solve Mineral Shortages – and Lead to Epic Extinctions in Some of the Most Remote Ecosystems on Earth.”
Waste
And that, alas, is only half the story. All that involves thing we want, except of course deserts. And after we have exploited them, there is the matter of getting rid of the trash. That’s an issue of enormous magnitude, too.
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