INTRODUCTION
Sunday,
April 22, 2007, will mark the 37th anniversary of the first Earth Day, a
grassroots event at which 20 million US residents declared war on water, air,
and land pollution. Core support disproportionately came from young, liberal,
and highly educated non-Hispanic Whites.
They were excited about the creation
of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the National
Environmental Policy Act and about a dozen other laws that promised to control
emissions from factories, cars, power plants, and other sources and to better
protect the health of workers.
Notable global environmental organizations are
the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), World Nature Organization (WNO), Greenpeace and Friends
of the Earth. The results of these organization policies included the reduction
of emissions into water bodies and the air from sewage treatment systems,
factories, electricity-generating stations, and motor vehicles, and the cleanup
and control of some of the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites.
Thirty-seven
years after the celebration of the first Earth Day, the federal government and
the American public are focusing more on war, terrorism, and the economy than
they are on environmental protection. Core supporters of environmental
protection include a greater diversity of age groups, political perspectives,
ethnic/racial groups, and socioeconomic groups than 3 decades ago. What society considers “environmental
protection” has broadened, and the tools we use to devise policy have adapted
to these contemporary challenges (Sutton.W.2007).
Definition of the key terms
Environment,
is the sum total of all surroundings of a living organism, including natural
forces and other living things, which provide conditions for development and
growth as well as of danger and damage(Thomas .G. 2004 ).
Environment,
refer to the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant
lives or operates.
Environmental organization
is the paramount for implementation of the code as the provisions of the
general part which drafted in line with the principle that environmental organizations
carry a special role in the protection of environment-related public interest.
Environmental organizations can be global, national, regional or local (http://www.juridicainternational.index).
An environmental organization
is an organization that seeks to protect, analyze or monitor the environment
against misuse or degradation from human forces.
The following are some of the
critics of contemporary environmental organizations.
Increasing unsustainable
environmental pollution load, At any level of
development, human impact on the environment is a function of population size,
per capital consumption and the environmental damage caused by the technology
used to produce what is consumed. People in developed countries have the
greatest impact on the global environment. The 20 per cent of the world’s
people living in the highest income countries are responsible for 86 per cent
of total private consumption compared with the poorest 20 per cent.
A child
born in the industrial world adds more to consumption and pollution levels in
one lifetime than those children born in developing countries. As living
standards rise in developing countries, the environmental consequences of
population growth will be amplified with ever-increasing numbers of people
aspiring, justifiably, to live better. Rather than assign blame in the debate
over environmental challenges, both current and new consumers need to realize
and address the consequences of their levels of consumption. The difficulty in
facing these questions is that the answers are neither simple nor complete. The
most obvious environmental impacts are usually local, such as the disappearance
of forests and associated watersheds, soil erosion or desertification or the
brown haze hovering over cities.
Increasing severity of the
consequences of climate change, To date a neglected
aspect of the climate change debate, much less research has been conducted on
the impacts of climate change on health, food supply, economic growth,
migration, security, societal change, and public goods, such as drinking water,
than on the geophysical changes related to global warming. Human impacts can be
both negative and positive. Climatic changes in Siberia, for instance, are expected
to improve food production and local economic activity, at least in the short
to medium term. Numerous studies suggest, however, that the current and future
impacts of climate change on human society are and will continue to be
overwhelmingly negative. A report on the global human impact of climate change
published by the Global Humanitarian Forum in 2009, estimated more than 300,000
deaths due to climate change. In conjunction with the projected impacts of
climate change, forests face impacts from land development, suppression of
natural periodic forest fires, and air pollution. Although it is difficult to
separate the effects of these different factors, the combined impact is already
leading to changes in our forests.
Continued economic growth,
Environmental impact of extractive industries for a continent that is dependent
on its natural resources to achieve growth, the challenge of
ecologically-friendly sustainable development is daunting. Current patterns of
extraction of non-renewable resources such as gold, diamonds and crude oil have
had an untold impact on the environment. In Nigeria, oil spills and gas flares
have polluted the environment significantly for more than 50 years. The 2008
target set forth to eliminate gas flaring increasingly appears to be impossible
to achieve. In Southern Africa, abandoned mine sites have constituted an
environmental menace. The loss of productive land, surface and groundwater
pollution, and soil contamination are part of the legacies of oil and mineral
exploration. Africa cannot afford the current approach to resource extraction.
If the trend of unsustainable oil and mineral extraction is allowed to
continue, environmentally sustainable development in Africa will continue to be
a great challenge.
Rapid urbanization,
the majority of Africa’s population growth is expected to take place in urban
areas, largely due to rural-urban migration. Rapid urbanization in Africa has
been accompanied by new and challenging environmental problems. A sizeable
proportion of urban dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa live in slum conditions,
without durable housing or legal rights to their land. At least one-quarter of
African city dwellers do not have access to electricity. In 2000 World Health
Organization report estimated that only 43 percent of urban dwellers had access
to piped water. Nearly a decade later, not much has changed. Waste disposal
presents a tremendous health hazard in many urban areas in Kibera, Nairobi’s
largest slum; plastic bags are used as flying toilets. Clearly, current
patterns of urbanization are not consistent with the desire to have
ecologically friendly sustainable environmental development in Africa.
Accelerating technology
In Washington, April 3, 2014 Environmental Defense Fund and five oil and
natural gas companies are calling all engineers and technology developers to
submit a proposal for the Methane Detectors Challenge. A collaborative between
industry and environmental groups’ competition is designed to invent next-generation
technologies that will ultimately help reduce methane emissions from oil and
natural gas operations. Methane emissions are both an economic and
environmental challenge for the oil and natural gas industry. There is a market
need for cost-effective technologies that provide continuous detection of
methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that can escape to the atmosphere during
production, transportation and delivery of natural gas.
Natural gas is an abundant energy resource
that offers promise from a climate perspective. When burned, natural gas
produces about half the carbon dioxide of coal, and far fewer conventional
pollutants. However, the cleaner-burning advantage of natural gas can be
undermined by equipment that vents or leaks methane, the primary ingredient in
natural gas and a powerful greenhouse gas if it reaches the atmosphere.
Industry, academic and government technical authorities agree that
cost-effective, dependable detection technologies can promote meaningful
reductions in methane emissions. Environmental Defense Fund, a leading national
nonprofit organization, creates transformational solutions to the most serious
environmental problems (www.edf.org/methanedetectors
).
Increasing global divergence in
population trends, in the early and intermediate stages
of environmental degradation, migration can represent a logical and legitimate
livelihood diversification option. It is an adaptation strategy for affected
populations to help them cope with the effects of environmental degradation and
climate change. In this context, migration is likely to be temporary, circular or
seasonal in nature. Several studies in Western Africa have found that
persistent droughts and land degradation contributed to both seasonal and
permanent migration.
Migration, especially the mass influx of migrants, can
affect the environment in places of destination and origin, and along routes of
transit. Migration, climate change and the environment are interrelated. Just
as environmental degradation and disasters can cause migration, movement of
people can also entail significant effects on surrounding ecosystems. Instead,
migration can also be an adaptation strategy to climate and environmental
change and is an essential component of the socio-environmental interactions
that needs to be managed. Migration can
be a coping mechanism and survival strategy for those who move. At the same
time, migration, and mass migration in particular, can also have significant
environmental consequence for areas of origin, areas of destination, and the
migratory routes in between and contribute to further environmental
degradation.
CONCLUSIONS.
Contemporary
environmental concerns include water, air, and land pollution, as they did in
1970. But contemporary environmental problems range from problems inside the
home to problems on the global scale. Contemporary environmental issues also
include global environmental risks, such as global warming, flooding,
mudslides, and other natural hazards intensified by human activity. The consequences can be seen in the increased instability
and complexity of the environment, which produce environmental discontinuity.
References
T.
M. Koontz, T. A. Steelman and C. G. Thomas, (2004), Collaborative Environmental
Management, Cambridge
University press Washington DC.
P.W.Sutton,
(2007), The Environment, A sociological
introduction, Polity press UK
Written By AUSI CHIWAMBO (2014)-Teofilo Kisanji University
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