book chapter · Elsevier eBooks
Human activities and rapid global urbanisation have driven substantial increases in air, land, and water pollution. Cities now generate approximately 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating climate change and ozone depletion. These environmental shifts cause direct harm to human health on both short and long term bases, while triggering disruptions such as acid rain, shifting rainfall patterns, droughts, and floods. In turn, these ecological disruptions impair crop cultivation, animal breeding, and bird migration, alongside altering the incidence of disease vectors. Resulting resource pressures, particularly water scarcity, reduce agricultural incomes and provoke conflicts between farmers and herders in rural communities. The overarching consequence is biodiversity loss, which damages essential ecological dynamics and human wellbeing, prompting recommendations for cleaner ambient air.
Air pollution and climate change directly undermine the ecosystem services that sustain global food supplies, human health, and rural livelihoods. By connecting urban emissions to downstream effects such as crop failure, disease spread, and communal resource conflicts, this work highlights the urgent necessity for interventions that preserve biodiversity and maintain stable living conditions for vulnerable populations.
The abstract outlines broad analytical strategies and recommendations for cleaner air and biodiversity conservation rather than a proprietary technology. Consequently, it offers no basis for a direct commercialisation pathway, remaining at the level of policy guidance and environmental assessment for municipal authorities, environmental regulators, and agricultural planners.
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Human activities are linked to increasing pollution of water, air, and land. This pollution of the environment creates harmful effects on the organisms inhabiting the ecosystem within such localities. The increasing global population with the pressures of immigration to urban centers has created a frightening increase of urban population globally, rising from 751 million in 1950 to 4.5 billion in 2018. The pressure to feed this populace, provide goods and services to meet human needs has birthed unprecedented rise in commerce and industries of different kinds, making the cities of the world to contribute 60% to total global greenhouses gases emissions thereby polluting the air. The resultant greenhouse gases induced depleting effects on the ozone layer, have facilitated climate change with its attendant harmful characteristics, on the environment, ecosystems, and ultimately man. Greenhouse gases and other air pollutants are the central theme of climate change. This chapter has examined the impacts of air pollution on human health on short- and long-terms basis as well as on the environment such as acid rains, decreases/increases in rainfall and its impacts on crops cultivation, migratory pattern of birds, incidences of diseases vectors, flooding and drought with attendant ecological consequences on humans, crops, animals breeding and growth, and social-economic services. Changes in climatic conditions have been shown to affect animals and plants, while also tampering with income of farmers, while scarcity of water is shown to create conflicts between farmers and herders in rural communities, thereby creating social-political tensions in several demographics. The long-term impacts lie in the biodiversity loss, which distorts ecological dynamics in a manner that threatens humans, ecosystems/environment and ultimately the earth we all share. From this understanding, strategies to stem biodiversity loss and move toward cleaner ambient air were discussed and recommended.
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DOI: 10.1016/b978-0-323-99714-0.00005-4
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