ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

AND SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT
INTENDED LEARNING OUTCOMES

• At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

1. discuss the origins and manifestations of global environmental crises;
2. relate everyday encounters with pollution, global warming, desertification, ozone
depletion, and many others with a larger picture of environmental degradation; and
3. examine the policies and programs of governments around the world that address the
environmental crisis.
The world is better without human beings.
The world is better with human beings.
Which one is appropriate to say?
10 MAJOR CURRENT ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

Watch this video that tells about 10 major environmental

problems. Be able to narrate your thoughts about the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0pB1qw8SMs
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 (flash floods, extreme snowstorms,
and the spread of deserts) 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.
THE WORLD'S LEADING ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

3. Overpopulation
4. The exhaustion of the world's natural non-renewable
resources from oil reserves to minerals to potable water.
THE WORLD'S LEADING ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

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 by as much as 150 percent in the last 250
years.
THE WORLD'S LEADING ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

8. The depletion of the ozone layer protecting the planet from the
sun’s deadly ultraviolet rays to 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.
THE WORLD'S LEADING ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

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
megapolis, destroying farmlands, increasing traffic gridlock, and
making smog cloud a permanent urban fixture.
THE WORLD'S LEADING ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

12. Pandemics and other threats to public health arising from

wastes mixing with drinking water, polluted environments that
become breeding grounds for mosquitoes and disease-carrying
rodents, and pollution.
13. A radical alteration of food systems because of genetic
modification in food production.
MAN-MADE POLLUTION
MAN-MADE POLLUTION

• It has been the poor who are most severely affected by these environmental problems.
Their low income and poverty already put them at a disadvantage by not having the
resources to afford goof health care, to live in unpolluted areas, to eat healthy food, etc.
• In Metropolitan Manila, 37 percent (4 million people) of the population live in slum
communities, areas where "the effects of urban environmental problems and threats of
climate change are also most pronounced.... due to their hazardous location, poor air
pollution and solid waste management, weak disaster risk management, and limiting
coping strategies of household
CATCHING UP AND CLIMATE CHANGE

• The massive environmental problems are difficult to resolve because governments

believe that for their countries to become fully developed, they must be industrialized,
urbanized and inhabited buy a robust middle class with access to the best of modern
amenities.
• A developed society, accordingly, must also have provisions for the poor - jobs in the
industrial sector, public transport system, and cheap food. Food depends on a country's
free trade with other food producers. It also relies on a "modernized" agricultural sector
in which toxic technologies (such as fertilizers or pesticides) and modified crops (e.g.,
high-yielding varieties of rice) ensure maximized productivity.
COMBATING GLOBAL WARMING

• Governments have their own environmental problems to deal with, but these states' ecological
concerns become worldwide due to global warming, which transcends national boundaries.
Global warming is the result of billions to tons on carbon dioxide, various air pollutants, and
other gases accumulating in the atmosphere.
• These pollutants trap the sun's radiation causing the warming of the earth's surface. With the
current amount of carbon dioxide and other gases, this "greenhouse effect" has sped up the rise
in the world' temperature.
• The greenhouse effect is responsible for recurring heat waves and long droughts in certain
places, as well as for heavier rainfall and devastating hurricanes and typhoons in others.
COMBATING GLOBAL WARMING

• Combating global warming

• More countries are now recognizing the perils of global warming. In 1997, 192 countries
signed the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases, following the 1992 United Nations
Earth Summit where a Framework Convention for Climate Change was finalized.
• Social movements have had success working together, with some pressure on their
governments to regulate global warming. When local alliances between the state, schools, and
communities are replicated at thee national level, the success becomes doubly significant.
•