Environmental Crisis and

Sustainable Development
 The World's Leading Environmental
Problems
1. The depredation caused by industrial and
transportation toxins and plastic in the ground; the
defiling of the sea, rivers, and water beds by oil spills
and acid rain; the dumping of urban waste.
2. Changes in global weather patterns and the surge in
ocean and land temperatures leading to a rise in sea
levels, plus the flooding of many lowland areas across
the world.
3. Overpopulation

4. The exhaustion of the world's

natural non-renewable resources from
oil reserves to minerals to potable
water.

5. A waste disposal catastrophe due to

the excessive amount of waste
unloaded by communities in landfills
as well as on the ocean; and the
dumping of nuclear waste.
6. The destruction of million-year-old
ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity that
have led to the extinction of particular species
and the decline in the number of others.

7.The reduction of oxygen and the increase in

carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of
deforestation, resulting in the rise in ocean
acidity as much as 150 percent in the last 250
years.
8.The depletion of the ozone layer protecting the
planet from the sun's deadly ultraviolet rays due to
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere.

9. Deadly acid rain as a result of fossil fuel

combustion, toxic chemicals from erupting volcanoes,
and the massive rotting vegetables filling up garbage
dumps or left on the streets.

10. Water pollution arising from industrial and

community waste residues seeping into underground
water tables, rivers, and seas.
11. Urban sprawls that continue to expand as a city
turns into a megalopolis, destroying farmlands,
increasing traffic gridlock, and making smog cloud
a permanent urban fixture.

12. Pandemics and other threats to public health

arising from wastes mixing with drinking water,
polluted environments that become breeding
grounds for mosquitos and disease carrying
rodents.
13. A radical alteration of food systems because of
genetic modifications in food production.
CATCHING UP
For a country to become fully developed:

• Industrialized and urbanized.

• Inhabited by a robust middle class with access to
the best of modern amenities.
• Must have provisions for the poor
• Jobs in the industrial sector
• Public transport system
• Cheap food
• Relies on modernized agricultural sector
• United states is the model of this ideal society. However, it did
not reach the this high point without serious environmental
consequences such that;

• United States became “the worst polluter in the history of the

world”, was responsible for 27percent of the world’s carbon
dioxide emissions.

• 60 percent of the carbon emissions comes from cars and other

vehicles playing American highways and roads, smoke and
soot from coal factories, forest fires, methane released by
farms and breakdown of organic matter, paint aerosol and
dust
• China, India and Indonesia opt for the goals of economic
growth and cheap energy that encourage energy over-
consumption, waste, and inefficiency and also fuel
environmental pollution.

• In Nigeria, Niger Delta oil companies have “substantial land,

water, and air pollution.’
Thank You