Description
The Random House Webster’s College Dictionary define s “env ironment” as the aggregate of surrounding things, conditions, or inf luences. The surroundings include the air, water, minerals, organisms, and all other external factors surrounding and affecting a given organism, a s well a s social a n d c ultural forces. T he t erm “ecology” i s characterized as the branch of biology dealing with the relationships
and interactions between organisms and their natural environment. Both environment and ecology have the potential to change according to external and internal, and natural and man- made forces, such as severe air and water pollution, drought, f loods, deforestation, and land degradation due to natural disasters, wars, or political and social transformations. For example, heavy metal pollution, especially lead pollution, is considered to be one of the major factors that contributed to the fall of Rome.1
The industrial revolution and economic growth have also been linked to the observed environmental and ecological changes and transformations. The rate and the characteristics of the changes, however, vary according to the biophysical, geographical, social, cultural, and economic conditions and the intensity with which materials and energy are used and industrial pollutants are discharged to the environment.2
Economic growth, as expected, results in increases in both production and consumption of goods and services, and also generation of different types of pollution, waste, and by- products over a wide range of scales. Two important dimensions of the interaction between natural environmental resources and pollution are the “pollution patterns” and the “nature of variation” in the characteristics, health, and environment’s absorptive capacity for emissions. The dynamics of such interactions change according to the natural resource endowment and the environmental space. As a result, if the mechanisms of economic growth are not controlled or altered, they could severely impact the environment via overexploitation of natural resources and degradation and loss of environmental utility (physical, chemical, and biological conditions), space, and adsorptive capacity.3,4
The most discussed, publicized, and politicized impact of economic growth and industrialization on the natural environment is, however, the theory of the “climate change” phenomenon. Climate can be defined by patterns of temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind, and seasons, or the average weather over a longer period of time. Climate change, therefore, is explained by the change in the
statistical distribution of weather over given periods of time that could range from decades to millions of years. As a normal and expected phenomenon, climate has been changing throughout geological history, and as such, current climate changes can also be attributed to the natural variability. However, recent strong observational evidence and modeling studies suggest that human activities and industrial growth, especially during the last five decades, have significantly impacted the characteristics and dynamics of such a change, particularly with regard to the climate temperature profile and sea levels. Climate change is no longer perceived as the normal f luctuations of the weather; rather, it is identified as the factor that is altering the nature and rate of those changes.
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) refers to climate change as a change in the state of the climate that can be identified by changes in the mean or the variability of its properties over decades or longer. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has also identified climate change as a change of climate attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and is, in addition to natural climate variability, observed over comparable time periods.6,7