Even though forests provide frames for our homes and our lifesaving medicines, and even though they filter our water and the air we breathe, we are cutting down forests at break-neck speed. Globally, we’ve been losing more than 7 million hectares of forest a year, or 20,000 hectares a day. This is equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris each day, or about 33 football field’s worth every minute.
Billions of tons of CO2 are released into the atmosphere every year as a result of coal, oil, and gas production. Human activity is producing greenhouse gas emissions at a record high, with no signs of slowing down.
The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change calls for holding eventual warming “well below” two degrees Celsius, and for the pursuit of efforts to limit the increase even further, to 1.5 degrees. But if we don’t slow global emissions, temperatures could rise more than three degrees Celsius by 2100, causing further irreversible damage to our ecosystems.
Only about 1% of the world’s water is accessible for direct human use. This includes the water we see in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, as well as those underground sources that are shallow enough to be affordably tapped. Only this 1% is regularly renewed by rain and snowfall and is available to us on a sustainable basis. So we are in trouble if we use too much.
We use this same 1% of water to meet all our needs for drinking, sanitation, crop irrigation, and industrial production of stuff. And still, we dump everything from our poop to our hazardous waste in it, and we feed millions of gallons of it to our golf courses and lawns.
Water is also one necessary input in virtually every industrial production process. Paper-making plants use 300 to 400 tons of water to make 1 ton of paper. Growing cotton for one T-Shirt requires about 256 gallons of water. Producing a typical U.S car requires more than fifty times its weight in water. Much of the water used in producing these goods is badly contaminated by chemicals used in the production process, such as bleach, lead, arsenic, and cyanide.
Water is also necessary to power the machines that make our stuff: hydro-power of course, but also power generated from fossil fuels such as coal, fuel oil, and natural gas as it is converted in thermal power plants that need water to cool them down. Together, these make up the great majority of the world’s energy sources, and they all use water.
Already about one-third of the world’s population lives in countries that are experiencing water stress. Every day thousands of people – mostly children – die from preventable diseases contracted from ingestion of non-drinkable water.
Photo Credits: Alexander Schimmeck- Zunil Guatemala
Plastic pollution is an existential threat.
Plastics only began to be produced in large quantities following the second world war – but plastic pollution has since become one of the most serious threats humanity faces. By 2025, 60% of all plastic ever produced will have become plastic waste. It takes at least 500 years for plastic to decompose.
Much of the world’s plastic waste ends up in the ocean where it affects marine life. Up to 12 million tons of plastic debris is entering the global ocean every year. The UN calls it ‘a planetary crisis’.
Photo Credits: Claudio Schwarz – Unsplash
A new UN report finds that in 2022, humanity churned out 137 billion pounds of e-waste – more than 17 pounds for every person on Earth – and recycled less than a quarter of it.
That also represents about $62 billion worth of recoverable materials like iron, copper, and gold, hitting e-waste landfills each year. At this pace, e-waste will grow by 33 percent by 2030, while the recycling rate could decline to 20 percent.
At the core of the e-waste crisis is the excessive demand. Because with each passing year, we’re also throwing more and more of these devices away and “upgrading” to whatever newer, lighter, slimmer iteration of them has just appeared on the market. Along with steadily falling prices for personal technology, the electronics industry’s strategy of planned obsolescence is a big reason why humans generated 59 million U.S. tons of e-waste last year – more than any other year on record and 21 percent more than we were generating just five years ago.