write an essay on global environmental issues

Environmental Issues Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on environmental issues.

The environment plays a significant role to support life on earth. But there are some issues that are causing damages to life and the ecosystem of the earth. It is related to the not only environment but with everyone that lives on the planet. Besides, its main source is pollution , global warming, greenhouse gas , and many others. The everyday activities of human are constantly degrading the quality of the environment which ultimately results in the loss of survival condition from the earth.

Source of Environment Issue

There are hundreds of issue that causing damage to the environment. But in this, we are going to discuss the main causes of environmental issues because they are very dangerous to life and the ecosystem.

Pollution – It is one of the main causes of an environmental issue because it poisons the air , water , soil , and noise. As we know that in the past few decades the numbers of industries have rapidly increased. Moreover, these industries discharge their untreated waste into the water bodies, on soil, and in air. Most of these wastes contain harmful and poisonous materials that spread very easily because of the movement of water bodies and wind.

Greenhouse Gases – These are the gases which are responsible for the increase in the temperature of the earth surface. This gases directly relates to air pollution because of the pollution produced by the vehicle and factories which contains a toxic chemical that harms the life and environment of earth.

Climate Changes – Due to environmental issue the climate is changing rapidly and things like smog, acid rains are getting common. Also, the number of natural calamities is also increasing and almost every year there is flood, famine, drought , landslides, earthquakes, and many more calamities are increasing.

Above all, human being and their greed for more is the ultimate cause of all the environmental issue.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Minimize Environment Issue?

Now we know the major issues which are causing damage to the environment. So, now we can discuss the ways by which we can save our environment. For doing so we have to take some measures that will help us in fighting environmental issues .

Moreover, these issues will not only save the environment but also save the life and ecosystem of the planet. Some of the ways of minimizing environmental threat are discussed below:

Reforestation – It will not only help in maintaining the balance of the ecosystem but also help in restoring the natural cycles that work with it. Also, it will help in recharge of groundwater, maintaining the monsoon cycle , decreasing the number of carbons from the air, and many more.

The 3 R’s principle – For contributing to the environment one should have to use the 3 R’s principle that is Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Moreover, it helps the environment in a lot of ways.

To conclude, we can say that humans are a major source of environmental issues. Likewise, our activities are the major reason that the level of harmful gases and pollutants have increased in the environment. But now the humans have taken this problem seriously and now working to eradicate it. Above all, if all humans contribute equally to the environment then this issue can be fight backed. The natural balance can once again be restored.

FAQs about Environmental Issue

Q.1 Name the major environmental issues. A.1 The major environmental issues are pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and climate change. Besides, there are several other environmental issues that also need attention.

Q.2 What is the cause of environmental change? A.2 Human activities are the main cause of environmental change. Moreover, due to our activities, the amount of greenhouse gases has rapidly increased over the past few decades.

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Environmental Issues Essay

Climate change is happening because of human activity. We're releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping heat and causing the Earth to warm up. This is called global warming, and it's a huge problem. Here are some sample essays on environmental issues.

100 Words Essay On Environmental Issues

Our environment is changing due to disruption. These are small steps you can take on an individual level that together can have a huge impact on the environment. And if enough individuals start taking such steps, we could make huge strides towards preserving the environment for future generations. As an individual, you can:

200 Words Essay On Environmental Issues

500 words essay on environmental issues.

Reduce your energy consumption by changing to LED or CFL light bulbs and unplugging electronic devices when not in use;

Use public transport or carpool instead of driving;

Buy locally produced food and products as much as possible;

Separate your waste for composting and recycling instead of sending it all to landfills; and

Plant trees in your yard.

In the past several centuries, humans have altered land use in order to accommodate growing populations and economic development needs. This has led to a range of environmental issues such as habitat destruction, soil erosion, pollution, species extinction and water scarcity.

How Changes in Land Use Can Lead to Environmental Issues

As a result of the disruption due to growing population, the global climate has been thrown off balance, leading to more frequent and intense natural disasters like floods, hurricanes and droughts.

One of the most pressing environmental issues caused by changes in land use is deforestation. Trees are vital for storing carbon dioxide, as well as providing habitats for wildlife. Unsustainable logging practices have led to extreme cases of deforestation that result in global warming and habitat loss. Additionally, when trees are removed from ecosystems it can lead to soil erosion which contributes to water pollution and scarce resources for the surrounding wildlife.

In addition to deforestation there are many other activities that can disrupt land use such as oil drilling, urbanization or different types of agriculture. It’s important for us to be aware of how our behaviors can cause harm to our environment so that we can take steps towards improving land management practices in order to ensure our planet remains healthy for future generations.

You sit down to dinner, and suddenly you're confronted with a difficult decision. You can either have a steak that's been raised on a factory farm, where the animal has been exposed to antibiotics and growth hormones, or you can choose something that's organic and humanely raised.

The same dilemma confronts us when we shop for groceries, clothes, or anything else. Do we want to buy something that's bad for the environment, or do we want to make a conscious choice to purchase something that will help sustain it?

It's not always easy to make the right decision, but it's important that we try. Why has the climate been changing, and why do people think it's a problem?

Examining the Effects of Pollution

Pollution is having a devastating effect on the environment. Pollution is causing irreversible damage to our planet, and it's happening on a scale that is unprecedented in human history.

The effects of pollution are far-reaching and complex. They can be felt in every corner of the globe, from the air we breathe to the water we drink. Pollution is making our planet uninhabitable, and if we don't take action now, we will be facing a very uncertain future.

Impact of Deforestation on the Environment

Deforestation is a major issue that is contributing to climate change and has a serious impact on the environment.

When trees are cut down, it not only reduces the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, but it also leads to the release of carbon dioxide. This, in turn, accelerates climate change and contributes to the greenhouse effect. Deforestation also affects water systems, contributing to floods and droughts.

Exploring Lifestyle Changes to Reduce Environmental Impact

One of the biggest things you can do to reduce your environmental impact is to make lifestyle changes. This can mean anything from reducing your consumption to changing the way you travel and even altering your diet.

Reducing consumption means buying less, reusing and repurposing items, and recycling more. It also means being mindful of what you throw away.

When it comes to transportation, try switching to public transport or carpooling when possible. Or, if you’re looking for something a bit more sustainable, why not try walking or cycling?

Lastly, food is another area where you can make changes. Eating locally sourced food that’s in season reduces your carbon footprint and helps local farmers.

So, what do we need to do?

To start, it’s important to realize that individuals can make a difference. There is no single answer to this question; it will require action from all of us. But if we each take small steps in our own lives, we can make a big difference. Here are a few ideas to get started:

Reduce your consumption, and choose products that are environmentally friendly

Reuse and recycle whenever possible

Educate yourself and others about environmental issues

Support organizations that are working to protect the environment

Together, we can make a difference. Let's work together to create a more sustainable future for our planet.

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Environmental Issues - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Global warming: fact or fiction.

Introduction: Global Warming is the theory that the atmosphere of the earth is gradually increasing as a result of the increase in levels of greenhouse gases and pollutants being released. Since the Industrial Revolution, Earth's global average temperature has increased by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (The World Counts, 2014). There are generally two opinions regarding the argument of global warming: those who believe it is occurring and those who do not. People who believe in the issue back their opinions up […]

Carbon Footprint: Global Warming

Global warming (a gradual increase in the earth's and the oceans' average temperature) and carbon footprint (the amount of greenhouse gases primarily carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activities) coincide because without carbon footprint there would not be any global warming. When I was a child and growing up in Virginia, this state seemed experienced all four seasons. Today, this Old Dominion state seems to experience only two seasons summer and winter. I personally think this apparent change […]

Is Global Warming a Hoax?

Introduction As people, we can be privileged to all sorts of opinions. This creates the possibility of many controversies. Much like the argument Is Global warming a hoax? This is one of the most famous controversies happening around the world today. This dispute isn't just between the average person, scientist themselves disagreeing among one another. Which, is something I didn't expect before doing my own research. So the question is, what is global warming and why do some believe while […]

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How Can Climate Change Affect Natural Disasters?

Global warming is considered a consensus problem which affected the lives of many people and nature catastrophically. This terrible phenomenon can be described as the rise of the regular temperature of earth which occurs when pollutants in the atmosphere absorb the heat that has bounced off the surface and should be taken to space. (Venkataramanan, 2011). Many people disagree on its existence, however the usual temperature of earth has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit as said by NASA (Hardy, 2003). […]

Overpopulation in the World

Introduction The current world population stands 7.6 billion as per the United Nations Statistics, while the human population is projected to clock 10.5 billion in the year 2040 and 12 billion by the year 2050. The current human population growth rate per year 70 million. China has got the highest number of people per unit area, with the total population being 1.2 billion. The African continent has reached the highest population growth rate, which is 6 percent while the lowest […]

How does Global Warming Affect the Arctic Animal?

Over the past years, global warming had slowly gotten worse and is now affecting the animals leaving them without a home to go to. Not only does climate change increases the chances of natural disaster but also destructing our natural habitat and creating an unfit environment to survive in. What's worse is the rise in temperature leading a meltdown of ice among the arctic creating an extreme difficult condition and the struggle for species to make a living. Essentially, global […]

Greenhouse Effect & Types of Pollution

Transportation, industrial, phonic, water and air are all types of pollution coming from personal cars, cruise ships and smokestacks, decreasing the clean air to breathe, homes for animals, food production, and great changes to the poles. Global warming is severely affecting our planet, and it continues to grow out of control. Global warming is the gradual increase in the overall temperature of the earth's atmosphere. This causes the greenhouse gases to increase, increasing the levels of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and […]

Global Warming – Rising Temperature of the Atmosphere and Ocean

Throughout earth's history, climate has fluctuated (for example ice age). However, if you take into account how many organisms have evolved, and how each one depends on their habitats to survive, fluctuations will be more harmful now, especially to humanity. The main cause of global warming is thought to be the result of human actions, for example; Carbon dioxide emissions (from cars and other transport) interfering with the Ozone layer, deforestation (from workers creating space for cattle grazing), and farming […]

Global Warming: its Causes and its Real Impact on the Earth

The steadily increasing temperature of our planet's atmosphere is known as global warming. Global warming has been a subject of much political and social controversy in recent years due to arguments questioning its legitimacy. When the facts of these arguments are seen in context, their relevance becomes apparent. The data clearly indicate that global warming is happening and that it is human-induced. The anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases negatively impacts our environment, causing an increase in global temperature. This results […]

Global Warming Affects the Natural Balance of Environment

The world climate is changing significantly day by day. What is Global Warming? Global Warming is a gradual increase in the overall temperature of the earth's atmosphere generally attributed to the greenhouse effect caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide. Climate change causes an increase in average temperature. However a worldwide temperature adjustment are caused by characteristic occasions and humans that are accepted to be an add to accretion in normal temperatures. An Earth-wide temperature boost is a difficult issue […]

Climatic Changes in Greenland

Greenland is mostly covered in ice making it susceptible to melting from warm temperatures. The reason this country is named Greenland is because when Erik the Red was banned from Iceland he discovered this icy country and gave it the name in hopes of people settling (Pandita). In July and August of this year, the number of surface melt days on the Southwestern coast of Greenland was significantly above average, which is clearly an indication that global warming has begun […]

Global Warming – a Fix for the Future

Everyone has heard the infamous words global warming, but not many understand the disaster that's happening. Terms are thrown out such as carbon emissions and greenhouse gases the list goes on, and those not scientifically savvy tend to brush off what may become the downfall of humanity. According to Nasa's official website, The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and […]

The Art of Global Warming

Mankind has felt the need to leave its mark on history since the dawn of human civilization. There is evidence of this close to home in the tallest skyscrapers of New York and as far-reaching as Neil Armstrong's footprints on the moon. But how far is too far? As we have grown, so too has our knowledge of the world and the advancements in science and technology that come with it. So much so, that we are now faced with […]

The Greenhouse Effect

Human activities have contributed to what we now know as 'Global Warming' since the 19th century. Global Warming also known as the Greenhouse Effect is the warming that happens when Earth's atmosphere traps heat, almost like the walls of a greenhouse. Sunlight shines on the Earth where it is then absorbed and radiated back into the atmosphere as heat and is then trapped by what we call greenhouse gasses. Experts warn that we only have until 2030 to stem catastrophic […]

Climate Change: Vulnerability and Responsibility

When it comes to the environment people talk about how it is important to care for the earth we live in. While it is important to discuss such issues it is more beneficial to take action rather than to just talk about it. The earth is in desperate need of aid and though to many, it may not matter that the earth has increased a few degrees it can and has had devastating impacts. Taking responsibility for our home is […]

Climate Change – Scientists and Environmentalists are Deeply Concerned

Anthropogenic climate change and global warming cannot be denied. By reducing pollution, preventing deforestation and curtailing oil drilling, we can preserve the environment and mitigate the effects of global warming. Global warming is detrimental to Earth's environment. Most people are not aware of this and do not consider it as a major threat to earth's biosphere. The purpose of the images shown here is to highlight the causes, impact and mitigation of global warming. There are ways we can mitigate […]

Global Warming and the Future of the World’s Climate

Although hard to imagine, in less than a hundred years the US East Coast and other stretches of coastline around the world could be submerged underwater. Cites such as New York, New Orleans, and Houston could be swamped off the map as the waters of the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico overtook the previously dry land. The skyscrapers of the old downtown areas would become islands poking out of a vast sea of blue covering the roads and old infrastructure. […]

Climate Change – Critical Issue

I believe that among the numerous critical issues facing most Americans in this world today, climate change stands as one of, if not the most urgent. However, understanding and assimilating the different causes of the ever-growing environmental problems critically facing our lives today are crucial for reducing our pollution footprint. Climate change effects include major changes in temperature, precipitation, wind patterns, as well as other frequent disastrous weather phenomenon. That said, climate change policy in the US has transformed timidly […]

Global Warming – Several Major Agrarian Concerns

For many years, researchers have focused on maintaining the availability of food sources for the ever-growing human population. There are many factors that may impact the abundance of food; this research will focus on overall increase in temperature across the world and its impact on the agricultural environment. Global warming is a major research topic that presents several major agrarian concerns. In order to combat these concerns, scientists have been trying to find the root causes of problems presented through […]

The World should Turn to Vegetarian Diet to Stop Global Warming

A vegetarian according to vegetarian society is somebody who is on a diet of fruits, seeds, grains, vegetables, legumes, nut, yeast, fungi, algae, and/or some other non-animal grounded food (e.g. salt) with or minus dairy foods, eggs and/or honey. Global warming according to live science is the continuing temperature of the ground's surface, seas and thermosphere are any of the utmost frustrating environmental matters. Normal side heats high an entire of 1.71 units Fahrenheit (0.95 unit Celsius) between 1880 and […]

Causes and Effects of Global Warming

People are arguing if global warming is caused by man or if its a natural occurrence. Well, volcanoes have contributed to global warming such as El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991 they have cooled the earth's temperature but this was temporary. however, the amount of carbon dioxide they reliance is small compared to humans there are other things that can cause natural temperature changes tiny wiggles in the earth's orbit can change when and where sunlight hits even […]

Is a Tax on Carbon Emission a Way to Combat Global Warming?

In today's modern world, and especially during our current political environment, there is a big question of how important environmental issues are going to be now in our changing American government. Now that things are evolving and a new generation is casting their votes, most Americans are curious to see how the votes turn out and what are politicians will do regarding getting more awareness for climate change. After the elections, the next big concern is if the people within […]

Impact of Society on Earth’s Atmosphere

Everyday society is impacting the earth's atmosphere weather it is in a good or bad way. Mostly society effects the earth's atmosphere in a negative way, although people are aware of the current situation, they still continue to do the things that effect the earth atmosphere in a negative way. These things being burning fossil fuels, deforestation, or as easy as using fertilizers. According to climate change sheet 22 last modified on 07/18/2012 nitrogen contained in many fertilizers enhances the […]

Solutions on Pollution Issue

Funding is the most important factor in order to improve the current conditions of Vietnam. Seven principles which pollution control funds should aim to follow can be drawn from the decade of experience with environment funds of various kinds in Vietnam. To be effective, EPFs should: 1.Have a clear and overriding objective of pollution reduction and prevention. 2.Work according to a comprehensive pollution control plan of government which is based on credible and systematic priority setting procedures. 3.Integrate with the […]

How Global Warming Works

There's bright blue in the past, now there is horrible gray in the future and more heat in the summers, and the winters are getting warmer than usual. The seas and oceans rising, the ice caps falling, and animals decreasing. It is time to come to a conflict that could make our planet Earth fall. Welcome to a tremendous problem EVERYONE is trying to solve global warming. Industrializing is a benefit for us and the economy. All of this falls […]

The Global Warming Taboo

It is still hard to understand that the topic of Global Warming is still being thrown under the rug as it is perceived by some that it is not a leading issue that needs to be tackled. It makes me wonder why so much of America can't see the problems that are being created just by our everyday actions. Due to the fact that the issue is still under mass controversy leads the topic of global warming to be a […]

Natural Disasters and Climate Change

Global warming is the gradual increase of temperature in the world's atmosphere. It is often caused by high levels of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. It may also be increased by fossil fuels and agriculture causing many severe consequences, such as: species extinction, reduced forest and coral reefs, drought increases in Africa, severe flooding in Asia, threats to small islands because of ocean levels rising, and severe weather in hurricane zones. Our society today is destroying the climate. Every time […]

Climate Change: Environmental Protection Agency

Global warming, often referred to as climate change is used to describe the rise in average surface temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, a change that is believed to be permanently changing the Earth's climate. There is a great debate amongst many as to whether global warming is real( some call it a hoax). There is a broad-based agreement within the scientific community that climate change is real. The U.S Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space […]

Global Warming and its Effects

Global warming has been a top discussion for a while now. Some people believe it is true based on the change in weather, more fires/floods, and severe droughts in some areas while others deny the fact that it is occurring. Recently, the topic of global warming has become more of a political topic. This is probably because a lot of the industries that are causing some of the issues would be affected financially if they were forced to take responsibility […]

The Story of Stuff

Four main issues have been discussed in the fourth chapter, "Consumption" of The Story of Stuff. The four themes are discussed below: Unhappy People, Nation, and PlanetAnnie emphasizes that many stuff doesn't make us happy but the work done out of hard work makes one satisfied thus one is happy. She goes further to say that "we can only compromise so much until no solution is reached." If one is rich, it is assumed he is happy, and those who […]

Essay on Environmental Issue

Environment is the surrounding of an Organism. This Environment in which an Organism lives is made up of various components like Air, Water, Land, etc. These components are found in fixed proportions to create a Harmonious Balance in the Environment for the Organism to live in. Any kind of undesirable and wanted change in the proportions of these components can be termed as Pollution. This Issue is increasing with every passing year. It is an Issue that troubles Economically, Physically and Socially. The Environmental problem that is worsening with each day needs to be addressed so that its harmful effects on Humans as well as the planet can be redressed.

Environmental Issue

Our green world is now in Jeopardy. Humans depleted Natural Resources by polluting Water, Soil, and Air. We must tackle the challenges we have created by opening our eyes. The Environment has been profoundly impacted by Industrial Growth. People emit more Pollution for more convenience. Human actions have an impact on the Environment, both directly and indirectly. As a result, there is a symbiotic link between a creature and its surroundings. Let’s discuss some major Issues our Environment Issues which our Environment is facing nowadays:

Global Warming:

Foremost symptom of natural imbalance is Global Warming. When Greenhouse Gasses accumulate and cause the temperature to rise, we see the Greenhouse effect. It has an impact on the rising of the World Ocean level and the melting of Arctic ice. According to specialists, coastal countries and certain islands could be overwhelmed by water over several decades.

Increasing Population:

People require greater space and resources as their population grows, in order to meet all of their food and housing needs. To make room for pastures and agricultural fields, people began cutting down trees. Forests serve as the Earth's main lungs and the primary habitat for a wide range of animals, birds, and insects. Deforestation and Human activities have put a lot of forest species in Jeopardy.

Ozone Layer Depletion:

Depletion of the Ozone layer is a complex Issue that Humanity is grappling with. The Ozone layer absorbs UV radiation, which is damaging to Humans. Increased Ozone hole numbers result in more intense solar radiation and a rise in skin cancer.

Deforestation:

Plants and trees are essential components of Human life. Everyone benefits from trees because they give air, food, and medicines. Forests are being cut down to meet rising demand. During the summer, natural wildfires are common. To maximize profit, people take down trees in an unethical manner.

Climate change is occurring at a faster rate than it was a century ago. The weather change has an impact on industrial advancement. Climate change has resulted in disastrous hurricanes, floods, and droughts. In recent years, many countries have been hit by a slew of natural disasters.

Polluted Environments can cause a variety of illnesses. Many species of flora and wildlife that are important to flora are threatened with extinction. Nature preserves balance, and all Organisms' feeding habits are linked in a food chain, as we all know. In areas with petroleum refineries, chemicals, iron and steel, non-metal products, pulp and paper manufacturers, and textile industries, the problem of industrial Pollution is often severe.

Causes of Environmental Issue

With the rise of the industries and the migration of people from villages to cities in search of employment, there has been a regular increase in the problem of proper housing and unhygienic conditions of living. These reasons have given rise in factors for Pollution. Environmental Pollution is of five basic types namely; Air, Water, Soil and Noise Pollution.

Air Pollution:

Air Pollution is a major Issue in today’s world. The smoke pouring out of factory chimneys and automobiles pollute the air that we breathe in. Gasses like Carbon dioxide, Carbon Monoxide and Sulphur Dioxide are emitted which mix with air and cause great harm to the Human body, Flora and Fauna. The dry farm waste, dry grass, leaves and coal used as domestic fuels in our villages also produce harmful Gasses. Acid rain occurs due to excess Sulphur Dioxide in the Air.

Water Pollution:

Water Pollution is one of the most serious Environmental Issues. The waste products from the growing industries and sewage water are not treated properly before disposing into rivers and other water bodies, thus creating Pollution. Agricultural processes with excess fertilizers and pesticides also pollute the water bodies.

Soil or Land Pollution:

The next source of Environmental Pollution is soil. Waste materials such as plastics, polythene, bottles, etc. cause land Pollution and render soil infertile. Moreover, dumping of dead bodies of men and animals, washing of clothes and utensils add to this Issue. It is a very dangerous aspect of Environment since it affects the fertility and food production of the area and the country.

Noise Pollution:

This Issue is a very subtle form of Pollution. All Human activities contribute to noise Pollution to a large extent. Horns of the vehicles, loud speakers, music system, industrial activities contribute towards this Issue.

Problems like Ozone depletion, Global Warming, Greenhouse effect, change in climatic and weather conditions, melting of glaciers etc. are some more Issues in the Environment.

How to Minimize Environmental Issues?

To minimize this Issue, preventive measures need to be taken.

Principle of 3R’s:

To save the Environment, use the principle of 3 R’s; Reuse, Reduce and Recycle.

Reuse products again and again. Instead of throwing away things after one use, find a way to use them again. Reduce the amount of waste products generated.

Recycle:

Paper, plastics, glass and electronic items can be processed into new products while using fewer natural resources and lesser energy.

To prevent and control measures of air Pollution including better-designed equipment and smokeless fuels should be used in homes and industries.

More and more trees should be planted to balance the ecosystem and control Greenhouse effects.

Noise Pollution can be minimized by better designing and proper maintenance of vehicles. Industrial noise can be reduced by sound proofing equipment like generators, etc.

To control soil Pollution, usage of plastic bags must be stopped. Sewage should be treated properly before using it as fertilizers and as landfills.

Several measures can be adopted to control water Pollution. Some of them are that the water requirement can be minimized by altering the techniques involved. Water should be reused with treatment. The quantity of water waste discharged should be reduced.

People, unfortunately, forget that we are a part of nature. We must live in harmony with nature and take care of it. We need to rethink how we consume natural resources. People must be aware that the natural world is on the verge of collapse. People must recognise that they are not the primary users of the Environment and construct Environmentally suitable homes. We must consider future generations and what will be left behind after we are gone. People come up with remedies to Environmental Issues. We recycle trash, develop electric automobiles, reduce air, water, and soil Pollution, and restore land erosion by planting new trees. But it is not enough; people must drastically alter their lifestyles until nature takes the last drastic measures.

Saving our planet from these Environmental Issues is the responsibility of every individual. If preventive measures are not taken then our future generation will have to face major repercussions. Government is also taking steps to create public awareness. Every individual should be involved in helping to reduce and control Pollution.

FAQs on Environmental Issue Essay

1. What are the Major Environmental Issues?

The major environmental issues are environmental degradation, climate change, global warming, and greenhouse effects.

2. What is the Best Way to Control Greenhouse Effect?

Afforestation is the best way to control greenhouse effect.

3. What is the Principle of 3Rs?

The principle of 3Rs is Reuse, Reduce and Recycle.

4. How do you Minimize Soil Pollution?

Stopping the use of plastics can minimize soil Pollution.

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Essay on Environment: Examples & Tips

Updated on
May 30, 2022

In the 21st century, the Environmental crisis is one of the biggest issues. The world has been potentially impacted by the resulting hindrance in the environmental balance, due to the rising in industrialization and urbanization. This led to several natural calamities which creates an everlasting severe impact on the environment for years. To familiarize students with the importance environment, the subject ‘Environmental Studies’ is part of the curriculum in primary, secondary as well as higher school education. To test the knowledge of the students related to Environment, a question related to the topic in the form of essay or article writing is included in the exam. This blog aims to focus on providing details to students on the way, they can draft a well-written essay on Environment.

This Blog Includes:

Overview on environment, tips on writing an effective essay, format (150 words), sample essay on environment, environment essay (100 words), essay on environment (200-250 words), environment essay (300 words), world environment day.

To begin the essay on Environment, students must know what it is all about. Biotic (plants, animals, and microorganisms) and abiotic (non-living physical factors) components in our surroundings fall under the terminology of the environment. Everything that surrounds us is a part of the environment and facilitates our existence on the planet.

Before writing an effective essay on Environment, another thing students need to ensure is to get familiarised with the structure of essay writing. The major tips which students need to keep in mind, while drafting the essay are:

Research on the given topic thoroughly : The students must research the topic given in the essay, for example: while drafting an essay on the environment, students must mention the recent events, so to provide the reader with a view into their understanding of this concept.
Jot down the important points: When the students research the topic, students must note down the points which need to be included in the essay.
Quote down the important examples: Students must quote the important examples in the introductory paragraphs and the subsequent paragraphs as well.
Revise the Essay: The student after finishing writing students must revise the content to locate any grammatical errors as well as other mistakes.

Essay on Environment: Format & Samples

Now that you are aware of the key elements of drafting an essay on Environment, take a look at the format of essay writing first:

Introduction

The student must begin the essay by, detailing an overview of the topic in a very simple way in around 30-40 words. In the introduction of the essay on Environment, the student can make it interesting by recent instances or adding questions.

Body of Content

The content after the introduction can be explained in around 80 words, on a given topic in detail. This part must contain maximum detail in this part of the Essay. For the Environment essay, students can describe ways the environment is hampered and different ways to prevent and protect it.

In the essay on Environment, students can focus on summing the essay in 30-40 words, by writing its aim, types, and purposes briefly. This section must swaddle up all the details which are explained in the body of the content.

Below is a sample of an Essay on Environment to give you an idea of the way to write one:

The natural surroundings that enable life to thrive, nurture, and destroy on our planet called earth are referred to as an environment. The natural environment is vital to the survival of life on Earth, allowing humans, animals, and other living things to thrive and evolve naturally. However, our ecosystem is being harmed as a result of certain wicked and selfish human actions. It is the most essential issue, and everyone should understand how to safeguard our environment and maintain the natural balance on this planet for life to continue to exist.

Nature provides an environment that nourishes life on the planet. The environment encompasses everything humans need to live, including water, air, sunshine, land, plants, animals, forests, and other natural resources. Our surroundings play a critical role in enabling the existence of healthy life on the planet. However, due to man-made technical advancements in the current period, our environment is deteriorating day by day. As a result, environmental contamination has risen to the top of our priority list.

Environmental pollution has a detrimental impact on our everyday lives in a variety of ways, including socially, physically, economically, emotionally, and cognitively. Contamination of the environment causes a variety of ailments that can last a person’s entire life. It is not a problem of a neighborhood or a city; it is a global issue that cannot be handled by a single person’s efforts. It has the potential to end life in a day if it is not appropriately handled. Every ordinary citizen should participate in the government’s environmental protection effort.

Between June 5 and June 16, World Environment Day is commemorated to raise awareness about the environment and to educate people about its importance. On this day, awareness initiatives are held in a variety of locations.

The environment is made up of plants, animals, birds, reptiles, insects, water bodies, fish, humans, trees, microbes, and many other things. Furthermore, they all contribute to the ecosystem.

The physical, social, and cultural environments are the three categories of environments. Besides, various scientists have defined different types and numbers of environments.

1. Do not leave rubbish in public areas. 2. Minimize the use of plastic 3. Items should be reduced, reused, and recycled. 4. Prevent water and soil contamination

Hope the blog has given you an idea of how to write an essay on the Environment. If you are planning to study abroad and want help in writing your essays, then let Leverage Edu be your helping hand. Our experts will assist you in writing an excellent SOP for your study abroad consultant application.

Sonal is a creative, enthusiastic writer and editor who has worked extensively for the Study Abroad domain. She splits her time between shooting fun insta reels and learning new tools for content marketing. If she is missing from her desk, you can find her with a group of people cracking silly jokes or petting neighbourhood dogs.

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Introductory essay

Written by the educators who created Climate Change, a brief look at the key facts, tough questions and big ideas in their field. Begin this TED Study with a fascinating read that gives context and clarity to the material.

The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now. James Hansen, June 24, 1988

The drought that crippled much of the U.S. and Canada in 1988-89 was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history prior to Hurricane Katrina. It spawned dust storms in the Midwest and forest fires in Yellowstone National Park. That summer, thousands died during an intense heat wave.

It was against this backdrop, on a 101-degree day in the nation's capital, that NASA scientist James Hansen delivered his landmark testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The next day, The New York Times ran a headline that read "Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Warns." Coverage of Hansen's testimony by the Times and other national and global media organizations transformed climate change from a relatively obscure scientific topic to one that people began to discuss over dinner, in the pub, at school and at work.

It remained newsworthy over the rest of that pivotal year. Days after Hansen's testimony, the World Meteorological Association (WMO) hosted a conference called "Our Changing Atmosphere," one of the earliest international climate change gatherings. 300 scientists and policy makers representing 46 countries attended. Participants called upon countries to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent or more by 2005, and by the end of the year the WMO and the United Nations Environment Program had established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously became one of the first world leaders to talk about climate change in a speech delivered that September to the Royal Society. "For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable," remarked Thatcher. "But it is possible that… we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself." In this speech and others she gave during the remainder of her tenure, Thatcher advocated for expanded climate research and for policies that would safeguard the environment and promote sustainable development.

As global public awareness of the issue grew in the 1980s and beyond, the science and its significance were vigorously debated. Is there credible evidence that climate change is real? If it's real, when and how will we feel its effects? If it's real, what should be done, and who should do it? (Thatcher herself reversed position many years later, calling climate change "the doomsters' favorite subject" predicated on science that is "extremely obscure" and leading to "worldwide, supra-national socialism.")

Climate change is still hotly contested and the debate is often shrill, with skeptics branded as "climate deniers" and activists derisively labeled "warmists." Tensions are palpable, as when nearly 800 NGO representatives walked out of the 2013 international climate negotiations in Poland.

How has climate change become so politicized? It requires us to tackle thorny ethical and economic dilemmas, like how the least developed nations will cope with the effects of climate change and who should help them. It highlights serious structural issues like how to reckon with entrenched carbon-based industry interests and the connected yet complex resistances to decarbonization efforts. It calls for global governmental collaboration on an unprecedented scale. Atmospheric chemist Rachel Pike comments, "It goes, of course, to the top of our sky, but it goes to the bottom of the ocean, to every corner of the globe. It's every nation, every people. It's political, it's economic, it requires debate; it's scientific, it's engineering. It's the biggest problem you could ever imagine." It's no surprise, then, that climate change prompts a range of individual psychological and collective societal responses—avoidance, fatalism, denial, paralysis and wishful thinking, to name a few.

It's also not surprising that the scientific evidence is contested, given that the indicators of climate change -- like changing precipitation patterns over decadal time scales -- may be difficult for ordinary citizens to detect, and given what's at stake once we acknowledge that those indicators are correct. Initially -- and even today, despite the fact that we've reached the gold standard for scientific certainty -- some have questioned the quantity and quality of the evidence, feeding the public's perception that the science is half-baked. In reality, by the time Hansen delivered his congressional testimony in 1988, he'd been researching the relationship between atmospheric components and temperature since the 1960s, building upon a line of scientific inquiry stretching back at least a century.

A crash course on climate science

During the previous century, French physicist Joseph Fourier (1821) and Irish physicist John Tyndall (1861) described the Earth's natural "greenhouse effect" whereby water vapor and other gases in the atmosphere regulate the planet's surface temperatures. By the end of the 1800s, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius had made the prediction that industrialized coal-burning would intensify the natural greenhouse effect. Remarkably, when Arrhenius calculated the quantitative effects on temperature his results were relatively close to what's predicted by modern climate change models.

In the 1930s, British engineer and citizen scientist Guy Callendar demonstrated that global temperatures were rising, using data from more than 140 weather stations around the world. Callendar argued that rising CO2 levels were to blame, but his hypothesis failed to gain widespread acceptance in the scientific community. Two decades later, American researcher Gilbert Plass analyzed the infrared absorption of various gases and created the early computational models suggesting that a 3- to 4-degree rise in temperature would result from doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2. For the scientists aware of Plass's work, Dave Keeling's findings a few years later were undoubtedly unsettling: the American geochemist provided the first unequivocal proof that atmospheric CO2 levels were increasing, based on analysis of atmospheric samples he collected at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

Many scientists assumed that the world's oceans would absorb the extra atmospheric CO2 that human industry was producing, until American oceanographer Roger Revelle and chemist Hans Suess demonstrated otherwise. The authors of a 1957 National Academy of Sciences climatology report quoted Revelle: "In consuming our fossil fuels at a prodigious rate, our civilization is conducting a grandiose scientific experiment."

Revelle's subsequent testimony before a Congressional committee helped put climate change on the radar of elected officials. In 1965, a presidential advisory panel warned that the greenhouse effect was a "real concern," and the U.S. government's engagement deepened when Nixon established the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1970. Political and scientific interest in climate change grew during the ‘70s, culminating in the First World Climate Conference sponsored by the WMO in 1979. The Second World Climate Conference a decade later paved the way for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was launched and the groundwork laid for subsequent international climate change negotiations.

The challenge of communicating climate change

The task of translating climate research for policymakers and the general public has been hampered by multiple definitions of climate change within and outside of the scientific community. As Roger Pielke Jr. argued in his 2005 article " Misdefining climate change: Consequences for science and action ," definitions used by the UNFCCC, IPCC and others profoundly influence public opinion and the range of probable policy choices. Additionally, the conflation of "climate change," "global warming" and "the greenhouse effect" in news coverage has fueled public confusion about how to diagnose and treat the problem. For our purposes here, "climate change" is any change in climate over time due to natural variability or as a result of human activity. This is consistent with the IPCC's use of the term.

Rachel Pike's comment that it's the "biggest problem you could ever imagine" reminds us that climate change is a dense and multifaceted issue. There are facets of climate science and policy where convergent agreement dominates, while in other areas, contentious disagreement has generated worthwhile debate and discussion. The media's conflation of these diverse dimensions into one sweeping issue has contributed to confusion and created a breeding ground for manipulation from outlier viewpoints to inadvertently or deliberately skew public opinion.

It's important that we critically assess who ‘speaks for climate change' and understand their agendas. To the extent that their claims are flatly reported, or that in the name of fairness and balance speakers are frequently placed on equal footing irrespective of their expertise, individuals and organizations have become empowered to speak with authority through mass media. This skews how citizens and policy makers understand climate change issues, the stakes involved and the spectrum of possible actions to take. Cognizant of this, in 2013 the L.A. Times announced it would no longer print letters from climate change detractors. L.A. Times letters editor Paul Thornton wrote, "Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published. Saying "there's no sign humans have caused climate change" is not stating an opinion, it's asserting a factual inaccuracy."

About this TED Studies collection

While poorly communicated information can hamper the ability to make important decisions related to climate change causes and consequences, accurate and engaging information accessed through these TED Talks gives you power: power to understand, power to share your understanding with others, and power to take action.

Here we'll consider the environment as our planet's renewable and non-renewable natural resources, and a support system for the quantity, quality and sustainability of human activities. We'll see science as a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge, sorting through the unceasing flow of human experience. We'll explore policy as guides for decision making about human management of environment, articulating the principles, intentions, and mandates about who gets what, when and how. And we'll contemplate values as systems of conduct and broad preferences (individual to societal) concerning the morality of outcomes.

We begin with three modules that center our considerations on the climate science. First, through science journalist Lee Hotz's TED Talk, we explore the evidence that the climate is changing. Next, photographer James Balog contributes additional compelling, visible, measurable documentation of certain climate change effects. Balog's talk also highlights critical elements of the certainty/uncertainty debate that has dogged the issue. Third, through the TED Talk by climate scientist James Hansen, we explore the convergent agreement in the scientific community that humans contribute to contemporary climate change.

We continue with three modules exploring the politics of taking action through mitigation, adaptation and cross-cutting market-based, risk-reduction regulatory measures. We start with a TED Talk from former United States Vice President Al Gore, who calls for various ways to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (mitigation). Next, we turn to the TED Talk by environmental lawyer Vicki Arroyo, who suggests ways in which human communities can reduce their vulnerability to climate change and increase resilience (adaptation). Then we consider cross-cutting, often market-based risk reduction efforts by way of a TED Talk from journalist Naomi Klein. Her talk opens a space where we can critically evaluate climate risk reduction endeavors such as the market-based cap and trade proposals that are considered an essential tool by some, and merely a shell game by others.

We finish with two modules that focus our attention on important values and ethics questions. First, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown challenges us to build a stronger global society by cutting carbon emissions in a way that is beneficial and equitable to all nations. Finally we turn to sustainabily strategist Johan Rockström's TED Talk about how nine ‘planetary boundaries' (which include climate change) can usefully guide ecosystem and environmental protection for future generations.

Let's begin with a look at the scientific evidence that's being unearthed at" the South Pole; science journalist Lee Hotz takes us there via his TED Talk "Inside an Antarctic time machine."

Inside an Antarctic time machine

Relevant talks.

James Balog

Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss.

James Hansen

Why i must speak out about climate change.

New thinking on the climate crisis

Vicki Arroyo

Let's prepare for our new climate.

Naomi Klein

Addicted to risk.

Gordon Brown

Global ethic vs. national interest.

Johan Rockström

Let the environment guide our development.

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Portrait of Priyanka Pillai inside the Design School.

‘You can solve anything’

Eyes on tomorrow, voices of today.

Candice Chen ’22 (left) and Noah Secondo ’22.

Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Alvin Powell

Harvard Staff Writer

Harvard students share thoughts, fears, plans to meet environmental challenges

For many, thinking about the world’s environmental future brings concern, even outright alarm.

There have been, after all, decades of increasingly strident warnings by experts and growing, ever-more-obvious signs of the Earth’s shifting climate. Couple this with a perception that past actions to address the problem have been tantamount to baby steps made by a generation of leaders who are still arguing about what to do, and even whether there really is a problem.

It’s no surprise, then, that the next generation of global environmental leaders are preparing for their chance to begin work on the problem in government, business, public health, engineering, and other fields with a real sense of mission and urgency.

The Gazette spoke to students engaged in environmental action in a variety of ways on campus to get their views of the problem today and thoughts on how their activities and work may help us meet the challenge.

Eric Fell and Eliza Spear

Fell is president and Spear is vice president of Harvard Energy Journal Club. Fell is a graduate student at the Harvard John H. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Spear is a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

FELL: For the past three centuries, fossil fuels have enabled massive growth of our civilization to where we are today. But it is now time for a new generation of cleaner-energy technologies to fuel the next chapter of humanity’s story. We’re not too late to solve this environmental challenge, but we definitely shouldn’t procrastinate as much as we have been. I don’t worry about if we’ll get it done, it’s the when. Our survival depends on it. At Harvard, I’ve been interested in the energy-storage problem and have been focusing on developing a grid-scale solution utilizing flow batteries based on organic molecules in the lab of Mike Aziz . We’ll need significant deployment of batteries to enable massive penetration of renewables into the electrical grid.

SPEAR: Processes leading to greenhouse-gas emissions are so deeply entrenched in our way of life that change continues to be incredibly slow. We need to be making dramatic structural changes, and we should all be very worried about that. In the Harvard Energy Journal Club, our focus is energy, so we strive to learn as much as we can about the diverse options for clean-energy generation in various sectors. A really important aspect of that is understanding how much of an impact those technologies, like solar, hydro, and wind, can really have on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. It’s not always as much as you’d like to believe, and there are still a lot of technical and policy challenges to overcome.

I can’t imagine working on anything else, but the question of what I’ll be working on specifically is on my mind a lot. The photovoltaics field is at a really exciting point where a new technology is just starting to break out onto the market, so there are a lot of opportunities for optimization in terms of performance, safety, and environmental impact. That’s what I’m working on now [in Roy Gordon’s lab ] and I’m really enjoying it. I’ll definitely be in the renewable-energy technology realm. The specifics will depend on where I see the greatest opportunity to make an impact.

Photo (left) courtesy of Kritika Kharbanda; photo by Tiera Satchebell.

Kritika Kharbanda ’23 and Laier-Rayshon Smith ’21

Kharbanda is with the Harvard Student Climate Change Conference, Harvard Circular Economy Symposium. Smith is a member of Climate Leaders Program for Professional Students at Harvard. Both are students at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

KHARBANDA: I come from a country where the most pressing issues are, and will be for a long time, poverty, food shortage, and unemployment born out of corruption, illiteracy, and rapid gentrification. India was the seventh-most-affected country by climate change in 2019. With two-thirds of the population living in rural areas with no access to electricity, even the notion of climate change is unimaginable.

I strongly believe that the answer lies in the conjugality of research and industry. In my field, achieving circularity in the building material processes is the burning concern. The building industry currently contributes to 40 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, of which 38 percent is contributed by the embedded or embodied energy used for the manufacturing of materials. A part of the Harvard i-lab, I am a co-founder of Cardinal LCA, an early stage life-cycle assessment tool that helps architects and designers visualize this embedded energy in building materials, saving up to 46 percent of the energy from the current workflow. This venture has a strong foundation as a research project for a seminar class I took at the GSD in fall 2020, instructed by Jonathan Grinham. I am currently working as a sustainability engineer at Henning Larsen architects in Copenhagen while on a leave of absence from GSD. In the decades to come, I aspire to continue working on the embodied carbon aspect of the building industry. Devising an avant garde strategy to record the embedded carbon is the key. In the end, whose carbon is it, anyway?

SMITH: The biggest challenges are areas where the threat of climate change intersects with environmental justice. It is important that we ensure that climate-change mitigation and adaptation strategies are equitable, whether it is sea-level rise or the increase in urban heat islands. We should seek to address the threats faced by the most vulnerable communities — the communities least able to resolve the threat themselves. These often tend to be low-income communities and communities of color that for decades have been burdened with bearing the brunt of environmental health hazards.

During my time at Harvard, I have come to understand how urban planning and design can seek to address this challenge. Planners and designers can develop strategies to prioritize communities that are facing a significant climate-change risk, but because of other structural injustices may not be able to access the resources to mitigate the risk. I also learned about climate gentrification: a phenomenon in which people in wealthier communities move to areas with lower risks of climate-change threats that are/were previously lower-income communities. I expect to work on many of these issues, as many are connected and are threats to communities across the country. From disinvestment and economic extraction to the struggle to find quality affordable housing, these injustices allow for significant disparities in life outcomes and dealing with risk.

Lucy Shaw ’21

Shaw is co-president of the HBS Energy and Environment Club. She is a joint-degree student at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School.

SHAW: I want to see a world where climate change is averted and the environment preserved, without it being at the expense of the development and prosperity of lower-income countries. We have, or are on the cusp of having, many of the financial and technological tools we need to reduce emissions and environmental damage from a wide array of industries, such as agriculture, energy, and transport. The challenge I am most worried about is how we balance economic growth and opportunity with reducing humanity’s environmental impact and share this burden equitably across countries.

I came to Harvard as a joint degree student at the Kennedy School and Business School to be able to see this challenge from two different angles. In my policy-oriented classes, we learned about the opportunities and challenges of global coordination among national governments — the difficulty in enforcing climate agreements, and in allocating and agreeing on who bears the responsibility and the costs of change, but also the huge potential that an international framework with nationally binding laws on environmental protection and carbon-emission reduction could have on changing the behavior of people and businesses. In my business-oriented classes, we learned about the power of business to create change, if there is a driven leadership. We also learned that people and businesses respond to incentives, and the importance of reducing cost of technologies or increasing the cost of not switching to more sustainable technologies — for example, through a tax. After graduate school, I plan to join a leading private equity investor in their growing infrastructure team, which will equip me with tools to understand what makes a good investment in infrastructure and what are the opportunities for reducing the environmental impact of infrastructure while enhancing its value. I hope to one day be involved in shaping environmental and development policy, whether it is on a national or international level.

Photo (left) by Tabitha Soren.

Quinn Lewis ’23 and Suhaas Bhat ’24

Both are with the Student Climate Change Conference, Harvard College.

LEWIS: When I was a kid, I imagined being an adult as a future with a stable house, a fun job, and happy kids. That future didn’t include wildfires that obscured the sun for months, global water shortages, or billionaires escaping to terrariums on Mars. The threats are so great and so assured by inaction that it’s very hard for me to justify doing anything else with my time and attention because very little will matter if there’s 1 billion climate refugees and significant portions of the continental United States become uninhabitable for human life.

For whatever reason, I still feel a great deal of hope around giving it a shot. I can’t imagine not working to mitigate the climate crisis. Media and journalism will play a huge role in raising awareness, as they generate public pressure that can sway those in power. Another route for change is to cut directly to those in power and try to convince them of the urgency of the situation. Given that I am 22 years old, it is much easier to raise public awareness or work in media and journalism than it is to sit down with some of the most powerful people on the planet, who tend to be rather busy. At school, I’m on a team that runs the University-wide Student Climate Change Conference at Harvard, which is a platform for speakers from diverse backgrounds to discuss the climate crisis and ways students and educators can take immediate and effective action. Also, I write about and research challenges and solutions to the climate crisis through the lenses of geopolitics and the global economy, both as a student at the College and as a case writer at the Harvard Business School. Outside of Harvard, I have worked in investigative journalism and at Crooked Media, as well as on political campaigns to indirectly and directly drive urgency around the climate crisis.

BHAT: The failure to act on climate change in the last few decades, despite mountains of scientific evidence, is a consequence of political and institutional cowardice. Fossil fuel companies have obfuscated, misinformed, and lobbied for decades, and governments have failed to act in the best interests of their citizens. Of course, the fight against climate change is complex and multidimensional, requiring scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial expertise, but it will ultimately require systemic change to allow these talents to shine.

At Harvard, my work on climate has been focused on running the Harvard Student Climate Conference, as well as organizing for Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard. My hope for the Climate Conference is to provide students access to speakers who have dedicated their careers to all aspects of the fight against climate change, so that students interested in working on climate have more direction and inspiration for what to do with their careers. We’ve featured Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, members of the Sunrise Movement, and the CEO of Impossible Foods as some examples of inspiring and impactful people who are working against climate change today.

I organize for FFDH because I believe that serious institutional change is necessary for solving the climate crisis and also because of a sort of patriotism I have for Harvard. I deeply respect and care for this institution, and genuinely believe it is an incredible force for good in the world. At the same time, I believe Harvard has a moral duty to stand against the corporations whose misdeeds and falsification of science have enabled the climate crisis.

Libby Dimenstein ’22

Dimenstein is co-president of Harvard Law School Environmental Law Society.

DIMENSTEIN: Climate change is the one truly existential threat that my generation has had to face. What’s most scary is that we know it’s happening. We know how bad it will be; we know people are already dying from it; and we still have done so little relative to the magnitude of the problem. I also worry that people don’t see climate change as an “everyone problem,” and more as a problem for people who have the time and money to worry about it, when in reality it will harm people who are already disadvantaged the most.

I want to recognize Professor Wendy Jacobs, who recently passed away. Wendy founded HLS’s fantastic Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, and she also created an interdisciplinary class called the Climate Solutions Living Lab. In the lab, groups of students drawn from throughout the University would conduct real-world projects to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The class was hard, because actually reducing greenhouse gases is hard, but it taught us about the work that needs to be done. This summer I’m interning with the Environmental Defense Fund’s U.S. Clean Air Team, and I anticipate a lot of my work will revolve around the climate. After graduating, I’m hoping to do environmental litigation, either with a governmental division or a nonprofit, but I also have an interest in policy work: Impact litigation is fascinating and important, but what we need most is sweeping policy change.

Candice Chen ’22 and Noah Secondo ’22

Chen and Secondo are co-directors of the Harvard Environmental Action Committee. Both attend Harvard College.

SECONDO: The environment is fundamental to rural Americans’ identity, but they do not believe — as much as urban Americans — that the government can solve environmental problems. Without the whole country mobilized and enthusiastic, from New Hampshire to Nebraska, we will fail to confront the climate crisis. I have no doubt that we can solve this problem. To rebuild trust between the U.S. government and rural communities, federal departments and agencies need to speak with rural stakeholders, partner with state and local leaders, and foreground rural voices. Through the Harvard College Democrats and the Environmental Action Committee, I have contributed to local advocacy efforts and creative projects, including an environmental art publication.

I hope to work in government to keep the policy development and implementation processes receptive to rural perspectives, including in the environmental arena. At every level of government, if we work with each other in good faith, we will tackle the climate crisis and be better for it.

CHEN: I’m passionate about promoting more sustainable, plant-based diets. As individual consumers, we have very little control over the actions of the largest emitters, massive corporations, but we can all collectively make dietary decisions that can avoid a lot of environmental degradation. Our food system is currently very wasteful, and our overreliance on animal agriculture devastates natural ecosystems, produces lots of potent greenhouse gases, and creates many human health hazards from poor animal-waste disposal. I feel like the climate conversation is often focused around the clean energy transition, and while it is certainly the largest component of how we can avoid the worst effects of global warming, the dietary conversation is too often overlooked. A more sustainable future also requires us to rethink agriculture, and especially what types of agriculture our government subsidizes. In the coming years, I hope that more will consider the outsized environmental impact of animal agriculture and will consider making more plant-based food swaps.

To raise awareness of the environmental benefits of adopting a more plant-based diet, I’ve been involved with running a campaign through the Environmental Action Committee called Veguary. Veguary encourages participants to try going vegetarian or vegan for the month of February, and participants receive estimates for how much their carbon/water/land use footprints have changed based on their pledged dietary changes for the month.

Photo (left) courtesy of Cristina Su Liu.

Cristina Su Liu ’22 and James Healy ’21

How Earth Day gave birth to environmental movement

The culture of Earth Day

Spirituality, social justice, and climate change meet at the crossroads

Liu is with Harvard Climate Leaders Program for Professional Students. Healy is with the Harvard Student Climate Change Conference. Both are students at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

HEALY: As a public health student I see so many environmental challenges, be it the 90 percent of the world who breathe unhealthy air, or the disproportionate effects of extreme heat on communities of color, or the environmental disruptions to the natural world and the zoonotic disease that humans are increasingly being exposed to. But the central commonality at the heart of all these crises is the climate crisis. Climate change, from the greenhouse-gas emissions to the physical heating of the Earth, is worsening all of these environmental crises. That’s why I call the climate crisis the great exacerbator. While we will all feel the effects of climate change, it will not be felt equally. Whether it’s racial inequity or wealth inequality, the climate crisis is widening these already gaping divides.

Solutions may have to be outside of our current road maps for confronting crises. I have seen the success of individual efforts and private innovation in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, from individuals wearing masks and social distancing to the huge advances in vaccine development. But for climate change, individual efforts and innovation won’t be enough. I would be in favor of policy reform and coalition-building between new actors. As an overseer of the Harvard Student Climate Change Conference and the Harvard Climate Leaders Program, I’ve aimed to help mobilize Harvard’s diverse community to tackle climate change. I am also researching how climate change makes U.S. temperatures more variable, and how that’s reducing the life expectancies of Medicare recipients. The goal of this research, with Professor Joel Schwartz, will be to understand the effects of climate change on vulnerable communities. I certainly hope to expand on these themes in my future work.

SU LIU: A climate solution will need to be a joint effort from the whole society, not just people inside the environmental or climate circles. In addition to cross-sectoral cooperation, solving climate change will require much stronger international cooperation so that technologies, projects, and resources can be developed and shared globally. As a Chinese-Brazilian student currently studying in the United States, I find it very valuable to learn about the climate challenges and solutions of each of these countries, and how these can or cannot be applied in other settings. China-U.S. relations are tense right now, but I hope that climate talks can still go ahead since we have much to learn from each other.

Personally, as a student in environmental health at [the Harvard Chan School], I feel that my contribution to addressing this challenge until now has been in doing research, learning more about the health impacts of climate change, and most importantly, learning how to communicate climate issues to people outside climate circles. Every week there are several climate-change events at Harvard, where a different perspective on climate change is addressed. It has been very inspiring for me, and I feel that I could learn about climate change in a more holistic way.

Recently, I started an internship at FXB Village, where I am working on developing and integrating climate resilience indicators into their poverty-alleviation program in rural communities in Puebla, Mexico. It has been very rewarding to introduce climate-change and climate-resilience topics to people working on poverty alleviation and see how everything is interconnected. When we address climate resilience, we are also addressing access to basic services, livelihoods, health, equity, and quality of life in general. This is where climate justice is addressed, and that is a very powerful idea.

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The Climate Crisis – A Race We Can Win

Climate change is the defining crisis of our time and it is happening even more quickly than we feared. But we are far from powerless in the face of this global threat. As Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out in September, “the climate emergency is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win”.

No corner of the globe is immune from the devastating consequences of climate change. Rising temperatures are fueling environmental degradation, natural disasters, weather extremes, food and water insecurity, economic disruption, conflict, and terrorism. Sea levels are rising, the Arctic is melting, coral reefs are dying, oceans are acidifying, and forests are burning. It is clear that business as usual is not good enough. As the infinite cost of climate change reaches irreversible highs, now is the time for bold collective action.

GLOBAL TEMPERATURES ARE RISING

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. According to a ten-year summary of UNEP Emission Gap reports, we are on track to maintain a “business as usual” trajectory.

The last four years were the four hottest on record. According to a September 2019 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, we are at least one degree Celsius above preindustrial levels and close to what scientists warn would be “an unacceptable risk”. 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 to above three degrees Celsius by 2100 , causing further irreversible damage to our ecosystems.

Glaciers and ice sheets in polar and mountain regions are already melting faster than ever, causing sea levels to rise. Almost two-thirds of the world’s cities with populations of over five million are located in areas at risk of sea level rise and almost 40 per cent of the world’s population live within 100 km of a coast. If no action is taken, entire districts of New York, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Osaka, Rio de Janeiro, and many other cities could find themselves underwater within our lifetimes , displacing millions of people.

FOOD AND WATER INSECURITY

Global warming impacts everyone’s food and water security. Climate change is a direct cause of soil degradation, which limits the amount of carbon the earth is able to contain. Some 500 million people today live in areas affected by erosion, while up to 30 per cent of food is lost or wasted as a result. Meanwhile, climate change limits the availability and quality of water for drinking and agriculture.

In many regions, crops that have thrived for centuries are struggling to survive, making food security more precarious. Such impacts tend to fall primarily on the poor and vulnerable. Global warming is likely to make economic output between the world’s richest and poorest countries grow wider .

NEW EXTREMES

Disasters linked to climate and weather extremes have always been part of our Earth’s system. But they are becoming more frequent and intense as the world warms. No continent is left untouched, with heatwaves, droughts, typhoons, and hurricanes causing mass destruction around the world. 90 per cent of disasters are now classed as weather- and climate-related, costing the world economy 520 billion USD each year , while 26 million people are pushed into poverty as a result.

A CATALYST FOR CONFLICT

Climate change is a major threat to international peace and security. The effects of climate change heighten competition for resources such as land, food, and water, fueling socioeconomic tensions and, increasingly often, leading to mass displacement .

Climate is a risk multiplier that makes worse already existing challenges. Droughts in Africa and Latin America directly feed into political unrest and violence. The World Bank estimates that, in the absence of action, more than 140 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia will be forced to migrate within their regions by 2050.

A PATH FORWARD

While science tells us that climate change is irrefutable, it also tells us that it is not too late to stem the tide. This will require fundamental transformations in all aspects of society — how we grow food, use land, transport goods, and power our economies.

While technology has contributed to climate change, new and efficient technologies can help us reduce net emissions and create a cleaner world. Readily-available technological solutions already exist for more than 70 per cent of today’s emissions. In many places renewable energy is now the cheapest energy source and electric cars are poised to become mainstream.

In the meantime, nature-based solutions provide ‘breathing room’ while we tackle the decarbonization of our economy. These solutions allow us to mitigate a portion of our carbon footprint while also supporting vital ecosystem services, biodiversity, access to fresh water, improved livelihoods, healthy diets, and food security. Nature-based solutions include improved agricultural practices, land restoration, conservation, and the greening of food supply chains.

Scalable new technologies and nature-based solutions will enable us all to leapfrog to a cleaner, more resilient world. If governments, businesses, civil society, youth, and academia work together, we can create a green future where suffering is diminished, justice is upheld, and harmony is restored between people and planet.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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WMO |Global Climate in 2015-2019

UNDP | Global Outlook Report 2019

UNCC | Climate Action and Support Trends 2019

IPCC | Climate Change and Land 2019

UNEP | Global Environment Outlook 2019

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Climate change is a ‘global emergency’, people say in biggest ever climate poll

A thermal power plant in Port Louis, Mauritius is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions on the Indian Ocean island.

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Almost two-thirds of over 1.2 million people surveyed worldwide say that climate change is a global emergency, urging greater action to address the crisis, results from a new UN climate survey revealed on Wednesday.

Described as the biggest climate survey yet conducted, UN Development Programme ( UNDP )’s “People’s Climate Vote” poll also showed that people supported more comprehensive climate policies to respond to the challenges. The survey covered 50 countries with over half the world’s population.

50 countries. 17 languages. 1.2 million people.The results are in of our #PeoplesClimateVote - the largest survey of public opinion on #ClimateChange ever conducted. Read more and explore the findings now: https://t.co/9s64aEletP#Mission1Point5 pic.twitter.com/TDkN7GcIz7 UN Development UNDP January 27, 2021

“The results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender and education level,” Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator said in a news release .

The poll also showed “how” people want their policymakers to tackle the climate crisis.

“From climate-friendly farming to protecting nature, and investing in a green recovery from COVID-19 , the survey brings the voice of the people to the forefront of the climate debate. It signals ways in which countries can move forward with public support as we work together to tackle this enormous challenge,” Mr. Steiner added.

‘Biggest survey ever’ on climate change

UNDP said that the poll was the world’s biggest survey ever of public opinion on climate change. It was conducted as countries prepare for negotiations at November’s COP26 , the 26th session of Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC ).

The survey asked respondents if climate change was a global emergency and whether they supported 18 key climate policies across six action areas: economy, energy, transport, food and farms, nature, and protecting people.

Its target audience of 1.2 million included over half a million people under the age of 18, a key constituency on climate change that is typically unable to vote yet in regular elections. Innovations, such as distribution across mobile gaming networks, were used to ensure that the young audience were reached.

According to UNDP, polling experts at the University of Oxford weighted the huge sample to make it representative of the age, gender, and education population profiles of the countries in the survey, resulting in small margins of error (+/- 2 per cent).

People want broad climate policies

The results showed that people supported “broad climate policies”, beyond the current situation, UNDP said.

For instance, in eight of the ten survey countries with the highest emissions from the power sector, majority backed more renewable energy. In four out of five countries with the highest emissions from land-use change and enough data on policy preferences, the majority supported conserving forests and land. Nine out of ten of the countries with the most urbanized populations backed more use of clean electric cars and buses, or bicycles.

The survey also found a direct link between a person’s level of education and their desire for climate action, according to UNDP.

There was very high recognition of the climate emergency among those who had attended university or college in all countries, from lower-income countries such as Bhutan (82 per cent) and Democratic Republic of the Congo (82 per cent), to wealthy countries like France (87 per cent) and Japan (82 per cent).

Findings also revealed that while younger people (under 18) were more likely to say climate change is an emergency, other age groups were not far behind, with 65 per cent aged 18-35; 66 per cent aged 36-59; and 58 per cent over 60, expressing affirmation.

“[This] illustrated how widely held this view has become,” said UNDP.

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the silhouette of people can be seen as a giant glowing earth floats on a lake

ENVIRONMENT

How global warming is disrupting life on Earth

The signs of global warming are everywhere, and are more complex than just climbing temperatures.

Our planet is getting hotter. Since the Industrial Revolution—an event that spurred the use of fossil fuels in everything from power plants to transportation—Earth has warmed by 1 degree Celsius, about 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

That may sound insignificant, but 2023 was the hottest year on record , and all 10 of the hottest years on record have occurred in the past decade.

Global warming and climate change are often used interchangeably as synonyms, but scientists prefer to use “climate change” when describing the complex shifts now affecting our planet’s weather and climate systems.

Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also natural disasters, shifting wildlife habitats, rising seas , and a range of other impacts. All of these changes are emerging as humans continue to add heat-trapping greenhouse gases , like carbon dioxide and methane, to the atmosphere.

What causes global warming?

When fossil fuel emissions are pumped into the atmosphere, they change the chemistry of our atmosphere, allowing sunlight to reach the Earth but preventing heat from being released into space. This keeps Earth warm, like a greenhouse, and this warming is known as the greenhouse effect .

Carbon dioxide is the most commonly found greenhouse gas and about 75 percent of all the climate warming pollution in the atmosphere. This gas is a product of producing and burning oil, gas, and coal. About a quarter of Carbon dioxide also results from land cleared for timber or agriculture.

Methane is another common greenhouse gas. Although it makes up only about 16 percent of emissions, it's roughly 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide and dissipates more quickly. That means methane can cause a large spark in warming, but ending methane pollution can also quickly limit the amount of atmospheric warming. Sources of this gas include agriculture (mostly livestock), leaks from oil and gas production, and waste from landfills.

What are the effects of global warming?

One of the most concerning impacts of global warming is the effect warmer temperatures will have on Earth's polar regions and mountain glaciers. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet. This warming reduces critical ice habitat and it disrupts the flow of the jet stream, creating more unpredictable weather patterns around the globe.

( Learn more about the jet stream. )

A warmer planet doesn't just raise temperatures. Precipitation is becoming more extreme as the planet heats. For every degree your thermometer rises, the air holds about seven percent more moisture. This increase in moisture in the atmosphere can produce flash floods, more destructive hurricanes, and even paradoxically, stronger snow storms.

The world's leading scientists regularly gather to review the latest research on how the planet is changing. The results of this review is synthesized in regularly published reports known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

A recent report outlines how disruptive a global rise in temperature can be:

Coral reefs are now a highly endangered ecosystem. When corals face environmental stress, such as high heat, they expel their colorful algae and turn a ghostly white, an effect known as coral bleaching . In this weakened state, they more easily die.
Trees are increasingly dying from drought , and this mass mortality is reshaping forest ecosystems.
Rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns are making wildfires more common and more widespread. Research shows they're even moving into the eastern U.S. where fires have historically been less common.
Hurricanes are growing more destructive and dumping more rain, an effect that will result in more damage. Some scientists say we even need to be preparing for Cat 6 storms . (The current ranking system ends at Cat 5.)

How can we limit global warming?

Limiting the rising in global warming is theoretically achievable, but politically, socially, and economically difficult.

Those same sources of greenhouse gas emissions must be limited to reduce warming. For example, oil and gas used to generate electricity or power industrial manufacturing will need to be replaced by net zero emission technology like wind and solar power. Transportation, another major source of emissions, will need to integrate more electric vehicles, public transportation, and innovative urban design, such as safe bike lanes and walkable cities.

( Learn more about solutions to limit global warming. )

One global warming solution that was once considered far fetched is now being taken more seriously: geoengineering. This type of technology relies on manipulating the Earth's atmosphere to physically block the warming rays of the sun or by sucking carbon dioxide straight out of the sky.

Restoring nature may also help limit warming. Trees, oceans, wetlands, and other ecosystems help absorb excess carbon—but when they're lost, so too is their potential to fight climate change.

Ultimately, we'll need to adapt to warming temperatures, building homes to withstand sea level rise for example, or more efficiently cooling homes during heat waves.

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Global Warming Essay and the Main Types of Pollution for Writing Essays

Rising sea levels, melting glaciers, dying cloud forests, and extinction of wildlife - all these phenomena are clear signs of the global warming process that has already been launched. But, what do we know about it?

What we call global warming is actually a very broad term. In a nutshell, it means fluctuations in the climate of our planet as a whole or in its individual regions over time, caused by a variety of different factors. Apart from changes in temperatures, global warming also results in a whole range of changes in long-term weather patterns and even causes extreme weather events, which bring irreparable damage to our entire ecosystem.

For centuries, human activities have been taking us closer and closer to the point of no return, and, now, global warming is already a major problem. Today, when changes are already occurring, the entire humanity is wondering how to stop global warming. While the answer is not clear yet, this issue became a common topic for debates and even academic papers.

Pretty much every student faces the need to write my essay about global warming at least once in a lifetime. If you are studying in one of the best colleges for astrophysics working on one now, you’ve come to the right place! Our article will tell you what types of pollution there are, share handy examples, and help you choose the best topic for your essay on global warming that will be interesting for you. Let’s dive in!

Causes of Global Warming

Most of the causes are there because of people and their activities. But, it’s also worth noting that there are some natural causes of global warming. Typically, writing an environmental pollution essay, you’ll have to cover both human-caused and natural reasons. To help you get started, let’s look at the biggest ones.

Burning fossil fuels - probably the biggest cause that leads to faster global warming is a mass burning of various fossil fuels that results in large emissions of CO2 into our atmosphere. The activities that bring the most emissions include transportation, electricity production, and industrial activity.
Clearing of forests and woods - the next big cause is deforestation, whether natural or human-made. As you may already know, trees play a huge role in restoring the atmosphere and, respectively, regulating the climate as they absorb CO2 emitted into the air and release oxygen back to replace it.
Farming - this may surprise you, but the biggest natural cause of global warming is animals that also release greenhouse gases. Thus, a significant percentage of emissions is caused by agriculture and farming.
Resource extraction - another reason for climate change is the extraction of natural materials that can’t be restored naturally for human use.
Pollution - finally, one last cause that speeds up the process of global warming is pollution. This spans air and water pollution, as well as the big share of plastic waste - all the pollution types we are going to discuss further.

Effect of Global Warming

Apart from analyzing some core causes, writing essays about global warming will also require you to delve into the effects it can have. Needless to say that the emaciation of natural resources, pollution, deforestation, and changes in the atmosphere can’t go unnoticed. But, what exactly will happen after global warming?

The primary negative effect of global warming is the drastic change in our planet’s climate. This includes rising temperatures, unpredictable weather patterns, and an increase in extreme weather events. But, this is not all that is there. Due to a changing climate and more extreme weather conditions, some side effects of global warming can include:

Rising sea levels;
Land degradation;
Loss of biodiversity;
Loss of wildlife.

These are the primary effects on our environment that can be caused by global warming.

Apart from that, there are also some possible social effects that we will feel on ourselves. The lack of natural resources and land degradation will likely lead to a significant shortage of water and food and, as a result, will trigger global hunger. Some other negative impacts on our lives can include the loss of livelihood and shorter lifespans, poverty, malnutrition, increased risks of diseases, and mass displacement of people.

Global Warming Solutions

Another important point to cover in essays on climate change and global warming is the possibility of solving the problem. So, let’s take a moment to talk about some of the solutions.

First and foremost, in an attempt to stop global warming, people are already trying to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Some of the most common solutions include a switch to alternative energy resources, transportation methods, and alternative industrial and other activities.

Apart from that, people are becoming more conscious about their everyday consumption behavior. For example, some opt for reusable bottles, shoppers, cups, and other items to reduce the use of plastic.

Finally, we can already observe a global trend for eco-friendliness in various spheres of our lives. People strive to make their homes, offices, and lives in general “greener” to help save the planet.

At this point, the solutions we discussed earlier are all that we can do for now. However, there is still a need for more innovative and effective solutions. So let this serve you as motivation. After all, who knows, maybe while writing your essay about global warming, you will suddenly discover more innovative solutions that will help us save the planet.

Now that you know everything about the definition, causes and effects, and possible solutions for global warming, let’s move on and consider different types of pollution that can cause it and that students can use as the base for essays global warming.

Glitter Pollution Essay Sample

Water pollution essay.

The first type of pollution and, concurrently, a great topic for an essay on global warming is water pollution. It shouldn’t be a secret for you that the world ocean covers 90% of the entire surface of our planet. It also shouldn’t be a secret that every living organism needs clean water to support vital functions. Given that, we can confidently say that mass pollution of water is a huge problem that we must drive attention to. So, there is no wonder why students are often assigned to write essay for me about water pollution.

If you are wondering what you can write about in your essay on water pollution, the ideas are countless. The pollution of the world ocean has been a pressing issue for decades, so there is plenty of information and examples to cover in an essay.

One great example for your essay is a worldwide famous oil company. Not so long ago, it became known that one of the oil-production leaders has been polluting rivers in Nigeria for many decades. The pollution had affected the lives, environment, and health of many locals, which made this case so high-profile. So, be sure to use it as an example in your paper.

Another good point to cover in an essay is the process of cleaning the world’s oceans from plastic waste. You can use this idea if you are planning to write a how to prevent water pollution essay.

Air Pollution Essay

We have already said a lot about gas emissions and how it affects the quality of air. So, here you have another type of pollution.

Just like water pollution, the rapid pollution of the air is also a big problem. Apart from natural causes of gas emissions, there are also many human-made reasons that make the problem worse. Namely, if you will be writing a causes of air pollution essay, you can write about the rising number of gasoline cars that boost emissions.

Also, you can tell your readers about different manufacturing and industrial activities that also harm our environment by producing too much CO2.

Another great idea is to write an essay for me answering the question, “how does air pollution affect our health?” Some of the negative effects include the risk of diseases and shorter lifespans. Not to mention a poor quality of life that results from air pollution.

Finally, you can write a solution of air pollution essay. With air pollution being a big issue in the modern world, we can already see humanity trying to resolve it. Some of the best-known solutions that are already there are alternative energy resources such as solar panels and alternative means of transport such as electric cars. But, you can definitely discover more solutions if you research the problem well. There are tons of helpful materials on the web, including air pollution articles for students that can be used for your essay.

Plastic Pollution Essay

Another common type of academic assignment is an essay on plastic pollution. So, this is the last type of pollution we are going to discuss here.

The issue is real. For decades, people have been trapped in the endless circle of large-scale plastic production and no-lesser plastic consumption. Each of us uses lots of plastic in our household. Not to mention that this material is generally used in all areas of our lives.

If you are planning to write my essay for me on this type of pollution, we would recommend you to write plastic pollution in the ocean essay. As for 2021, there are already over 5 trillion micro and macro pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans. The total weight of this plastic can reach 269,000 tonnes. About 8 million pieces are being thrown into the oceans every single day. And, the amount of plastic in the form of garbage is also huge.

To beat plastic pollution, it is vital that we learn how to recycle and reuse it instead of throwing all the waste away. So, here you have another possible topic for your essay. You can write about the global campaigns on cleaning the oceans and our planet from plastic.

Finally, one more topic you can cover is the Plastic Pollution Coalition. In case you haven’t heard of it, it is an existing social organization and advocacy group that found its mission in reducing plastic pollution.

After reading this article, you should agree that global warming is one of the biggest issues we’re facing in the 21st century. After decades of pollution, thoughtless consumption of resources, and blatant disdain for our environment, humanity finally begins to recognize the issues. And that is why essays on global warming and climate change are so important to write.

Global warming essays can help us drive more attention to the problems that we are already facing and the negative effects we can have. Also, writing such papers is a great way to inform students and other people about the solutions we can adopt to make a positive change.

If you are still hesitating whether it is worth writing a pollution essay or not, leave all the doubts behind. First of all, by writing such essays, you are doing a good deed. And, secondly, writing such papers isn’t as hard as it can seem. Though we still have many unresolved problems in this area, there is lots of information on this topic. If you research it well, you can find plenty of books, articles, scientific papers, and other materials on global warming. It is also possible to find a documentary on global warming, as well as many feature films. So rest assured that you won’t face a shortage of information. So, don’t hesitate and start writing your essay on global warming, and don’t neglect the tips and examples we shared here!

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Pollution is the introduction of harmful materials into the environment. These harmful materials are called pollutants.

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Pollution is the introduction of harmful materials into the environment . These harmful materials are called pollutants . Pollutants can be natural, such as volcanic ash . They can also be created by human activity, such as trash or runoff produced by factories. Pollutants damage the quality of air, water, and land. Many things that are useful to people produce pollution. Cars spew pollutants from their exhaust pipes. Burning coal to create electricity pollutes the air. Industries and homes generate garbage and sewage that can pollute the land and water. Pesticides —chemical poisons used to kill weeds and insects— seep into waterways and harm wildlife . All living things—from one-celled microbes to blue whales—depend on Earth ’s supply of air and water. When these resources are polluted, all forms of life are threatened. Pollution is a global problem. Although urban areas are usually more polluted than the countryside, pollution can spread to remote places where no people live. For example, pesticides and other chemicals have been found in the Antarctic ice sheet . In the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean, a huge collection of microscopic plastic particles forms what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch . Air and water currents carry pollution. Ocean currents and migrating fish carry marine pollutants far and wide. Winds can pick up radioactive material accidentally released from a nuclear reactor and scatter it around the world. Smoke from a factory in one country drifts into another country. In the past, visitors to Big Bend National Park in the U.S. state of Texas could see 290 kilometers (180 miles) across the vast landscape . Now, coal-burning power plants in Texas and the neighboring state of Chihuahua, Mexico have spewed so much pollution into the air that visitors to Big Bend can sometimes see only 50 kilometers (30 miles). The three major types of pollution are air pollution , water pollution , and land pollution . Air Pollution Sometimes, air pollution is visible . A person can see dark smoke pour from the exhaust pipes of large trucks or factories, for example. More often, however, air pollution is invisible . Polluted air can be dangerous, even if the pollutants are invisible. It can make people’s eyes burn and make them have difficulty breathing. It can also increase the risk of lung cancer . Sometimes, air pollution kills quickly. In 1984, an accident at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released a deadly gas into the air. At least 8,000 people died within days. Hundreds of thou sands more were permanently injured. Natural disasters can also cause air pollution to increase quickly. When volcanoes erupt , they eject volcanic ash and gases into the atmosphere . Volcanic ash can discolor the sky for months. After the eruption of the Indonesian volcano of Krakatoa in 1883, ash darkened the sky around the world. The dimmer sky caused fewer crops to be harvested as far away as Europe and North America. For years, meteorologists tracked what was known as the “equatorial smoke stream .” In fact, this smoke stream was a jet stream , a wind high in Earth’s atmosphere that Krakatoa’s air pollution made visible. Volcanic gases , such as sulfur dioxide , can kill nearby residents and make the soil infertile for years. Mount Vesuvius, a volcano in Italy, famously erupted in 79, killing hundreds of residents of the nearby towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Most victims of Vesuvius were not killed by lava or landslides caused by the eruption. They were choked, or asphyxiated , by deadly volcanic gases. In 1986, a toxic cloud developed over Lake Nyos, Cameroon. Lake Nyos sits in the crater of a volcano. Though the volcano did not erupt, it did eject volcanic gases into the lake. The heated gases passed through the water of the lake and collected as a cloud that descended the slopes of the volcano and into nearby valleys . As the toxic cloud moved across the landscape, it killed birds and other organisms in their natural habitat . This air pollution also killed thousands of cattle and as many as 1,700 people. Most air pollution is not natural, however. It comes from burning fossil fuels —coal, oil , and natural gas . When gasoline is burned to power cars and trucks, it produces carbon monoxide , a colorless, odorless gas. The gas is harmful in high concentrations , or amounts. City traffic produces highly concentrated carbon monoxide. Cars and factories produce other common pollutants, including nitrogen oxide , sulfur dioxide, and hydrocarbons . These chemicals react with sunlight to produce smog , a thick fog or haze of air pollution. The smog is so thick in Linfen, China, that people can seldom see the sun. Smog can be brown or grayish blue, depending on which pollutants are in it. Smog makes breathing difficult, especially for children and older adults. Some cities that suffer from extreme smog issue air pollution warnings. The government of Hong Kong, for example, will warn people not to go outside or engage in strenuous physical activity (such as running or swimming) when smog is very thick.

When air pollutants such as nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide mix with moisture, they change into acids . They then fall back to earth as acid rain . Wind often carries acid rain far from the pollution source. Pollutants produced by factories and power plants in Spain can fall as acid rain in Norway. Acid rain can kill all the trees in a forest . It can also devastate lakes, streams, and other waterways. When lakes become acidic, fish can’t survive . In Sweden, acid rain created thousands of “ dead lakes ,” where fish no longer live. Acid rain also wears away marble and other kinds of stone . It has erased the words on gravestones and damaged many historic buildings and monuments . The Taj Mahal , in Agra, India, was once gleaming white. Years of exposure to acid rain has left it pale. Governments have tried to prevent acid rain by limiting the amount of pollutants released into the air. In Europe and North America, they have had some success, but acid rain remains a major problem in the developing world , especially Asia. Greenhouse gases are another source of air pollution. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane occur naturally in the atmosphere. In fact, they are necessary for life on Earth. They absorb sunlight reflected from Earth, preventing it from escaping into space. By trapping heat in the atmosphere, they keep Earth warm enough for people to live. This is called the greenhouse effect . But human activities such as burning fossil fuels and destroying forests have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This has increased the greenhouse effect, and average temperatures across the globe are rising. The decade that began in the year 2000 was the warmest on record. This increase in worldwide average temperatures, caused in part by human activity, is called global warming . Global warming is causing ice sheets and glaciers to melt. The melting ice is causing sea levels to rise at a rate of two millimeters (0.09 inches) per year. The rising seas will eventually flood low-lying coastal regions . Entire nations, such as the islands of Maldives, are threatened by this climate change . Global warming also contributes to the phenomenon of ocean acidification . Ocean acidification is the process of ocean waters absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Fewer organisms can survive in warmer, less salty waters. The ocean food web is threatened as plants and animals such as coral fail to adapt to more acidic oceans. Scientists have predicted that global warming will cause an increase in severe storms . It will also cause more droughts in some regions and more flooding in others. The change in average temperatures is already shrinking some habitats, the regions where plants and animals naturally live. Polar bears hunt seals from sea ice in the Arctic. The melting ice is forcing polar bears to travel farther to find food , and their numbers are shrinking. People and governments can respond quickly and effectively to reduce air pollution. Chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are a dangerous form of air pollution that governments worked to reduce in the 1980s and 1990s. CFCs are found in gases that cool refrigerators, in foam products, and in aerosol cans . CFCs damage the ozone layer , a region in Earth’s upper atmosphere. The ozone layer protects Earth by absorbing much of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation . When people are exposed to more ultraviolet radiation, they are more likely to develop skin cancer, eye diseases, and other illnesses. In the 1980s, scientists noticed that the ozone layer over Antarctica was thinning. This is often called the “ ozone hole .” No one lives permanently in Antarctica. But Australia, the home of more than 22 million people, lies at the edge of the hole. In the 1990s, the Australian government began an effort to warn people of the dangers of too much sun. Many countries, including the United States, now severely limit the production of CFCs. Water Pollution Some polluted water looks muddy, smells bad, and has garbage floating in it. Some polluted water looks clean, but is filled with harmful chemicals you can’t see or smell. Polluted water is unsafe for drinking and swimming. Some people who drink polluted water are exposed to hazardous chemicals that may make them sick years later. Others consume bacteria and other tiny aquatic organisms that cause disease. The United Nations estimates that 4,000 children die every day from drinking dirty water. Sometimes, polluted water harms people indirectly. They get sick because the fish that live in polluted water are unsafe to eat. They have too many pollutants in their flesh. There are some natural sources of water pollution. Oil and natural gas, for example, can leak into oceans and lakes from natural underground sources. These sites are called petroleum seeps . The world’s largest petroleum seep is the Coal Oil Point Seep, off the coast of the U.S. state of California. The Coal Oil Point Seep releases so much oil that tar balls wash up on nearby beaches . Tar balls are small, sticky pieces of pollution that eventually decompose in the ocean.

Human activity also contributes to water pollution. Chemicals and oils from factories are sometimes dumped or seep into waterways. These chemicals are called runoff. Chemicals in runoff can create a toxic environment for aquatic life. Runoff can also help create a fertile environment for cyanobacteria , also called blue-green algae . Cyanobacteria reproduce rapidly, creating a harmful algal bloom (HAB) . Harmful algal blooms prevent organisms such as plants and fish from living in the ocean. They are associated with “ dead zones ” in the world’s lakes and rivers, places where little life exists below surface water. Mining and drilling can also contribute to water pollution. Acid mine drainage (AMD) is a major contributor to pollution of rivers and streams near coal mines . Acid helps miners remove coal from the surrounding rocks . The acid is washed into streams and rivers, where it reacts with rocks and sand. It releases chemical sulfur from the rocks and sand, creating a river rich in sulfuric acid . Sulfuric acid is toxic to plants, fish, and other aquatic organisms. Sulfuric acid is also toxic to people, making rivers polluted by AMD dangerous sources of water for drinking and hygiene . Oil spills are another source of water pollution. In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing oil to gush from the ocean floor. In the following months, hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spewed into the gulf waters. The spill produced large plumes of oil under the sea and an oil slick on the surface as large as 24,000 square kilometers (9,100 square miles). The oil slick coated wetlands in the U.S. states of Louisiana and Mississippi, killing marsh plants and aquatic organisms such as crabs and fish. Birds, such as pelicans , became coated in oil and were unable to fly or access food. More than two million animals died as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Buried chemical waste can also pollute water supplies. For many years, people disposed of chemical wastes carelessly, not realizing its dangers. In the 1970s, people living in the Love Canal area in Niagara Falls, New York, suffered from extremely high rates of cancer and birth defects . It was discovered that a chemical waste dump had poisoned the area’s water. In 1978, 800 families living in Love Canal had to a bandon their homes. If not disposed of properly, radioactive waste from nuclear power plants can escape into the environment. Radioactive waste can harm living things and pollute the water. Sewage that has not been properly treated is a common source of water pollution. Many cities around the world have poor sewage systems and sewage treatment plants. Delhi, the capital of India, is home to more than 21 million people. More than half the sewage and other waste produced in the city are dumped into the Yamuna River. This pollution makes the river dangerous to use as a source of water for drinking or hygiene. It also reduces the river’s fishery , resulting in less food for the local community. A major source of water pollution is fertilizer used in agriculture . Fertilizer is material added to soil to make plants grow larger and faster. Fertilizers usually contain large amounts of the elements nitrogen and phosphorus , which help plants grow. Rainwater washes fertilizer into streams and lakes. There, the nitrogen and phosphorus cause cyanobacteria to form harmful algal blooms. Rain washes other pollutants into streams and lakes. It picks up animal waste from cattle ranches. Cars drip oil onto the street, and rain carries it into storm drains , which lead to waterways such as rivers and seas. Rain sometimes washes chemical pesticides off of plants and into streams. Pesticides can also seep into groundwater , the water beneath the surface of the Earth. Heat can pollute water. Power plants, for example, produce a huge amount of heat. Power plants are often located on rivers so they can use the water as a coolant . Cool water circulates through the plant, absorbing heat. The heated water is then returned to the river. Aquatic creatures are sensitive to changes in temperature. Some fish, for example, can only live in cold water. Warmer river temperatures prevent fish eggs from hatching. Warmer river water also contributes to harmful algal blooms. Another type of water pollution is simple garbage. The Citarum River in Indonesia, for example, has so much garbage floating in it that you cannot see the water. Floating trash makes the river difficult to fish in. Aquatic animals such as fish and turtles mistake trash, such as plastic bags, for food. Plastic bags and twine can kill many ocean creatures. Chemical pollutants in trash can also pollute the water, making it toxic for fish and people who use the river as a source of drinking water. The fish that are caught in a polluted river often have high levels of chemical toxins in their flesh. People absorb these toxins as they eat the fish. Garbage also fouls the ocean. Many plastic bottles and other pieces of trash are thrown overboard from boats. The wind blows trash out to sea. Ocean currents carry plastics and other floating trash to certain places on the globe, where it cannot escape. The largest of these areas, called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. According to some estimates, this garbage patch is the size of Texas. The trash is a threat to fish and seabirds, which mistake the plastic for food. Many of the plastics are covered with chemical pollutants. Land Pollution Many of the same pollutants that foul the water also harm the land. Mining sometimes leaves the soil contaminated with dangerous chemicals. Pesticides and fertilizers from agricultural fields are blown by the wind. They can harm plants, animals, and sometimes people. Some fruits and vegetables absorb the pesticides that help them grow. When people consume the fruits and vegetables, the pesticides enter their bodies. Some pesticides can cause cancer and other diseases. A pesticide called DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was once commonly used to kill insects, especially mosquitoes. In many parts of the world, mosquitoes carry a disease called malaria , which kills a million people every year. Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize for his understanding of how DDT can control insects and other pests. DDT is responsible for reducing malaria in places such as Taiwan and Sri Lanka. In 1962, American biologist Rachel Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring , which discussed the dangers of DDT. She argued that it could contribute to cancer in humans. She also explained how it was destroying bird eggs, which caused the number of bald eagles, brown pelicans, and ospreys to drop. In 1972, the United States banned the use of DDT. Many other countries also banned it. But DDT didn’t disappear entirely. Today, many governments support the use of DDT because it remains the most effective way to combat malaria. Trash is another form of land pollution. Around the world, paper, cans, glass jars, plastic products, and junked cars and appliances mar the landscape. Litter makes it difficult for plants and other producers in the food web to create nutrients . Animals can die if they mistakenly eat plastic. Garbage often contains dangerous pollutants such as oils, chemicals, and ink. These pollutants can leech into the soil and harm plants, animals, and people. Inefficient garbage collection systems contribute to land pollution. Often, the garbage is picked up and brought to a dump, or landfill . Garbage is buried in landfills. Sometimes, communities produce so much garbage that their landfills are filling up. They are running out of places to dump their trash. A massive landfill near Quezon City, Philippines, was the site of a land pollution tragedy in 2000. Hundreds of people lived on the slopes of the Quezon City landfill. These people made their living from recycling and selling items found in the landfill. However, the landfill was not secure. Heavy rains caused a trash landslide, killing 218 people. Sometimes, landfills are not completely sealed off from the land around them. Pollutants from the landfill leak into the earth in which they are buried. Plants that grow in the earth may be contaminated, and the herbivores that eat the plants also become contaminated. So do the predators that consume the herbivores. This process, where a chemical builds up in each level of the food web, is called bioaccumulation . Pollutants leaked from landfills also leak into local groundwater supplies. There, the aquatic food web (from microscopic algae to fish to predators such as sharks or eagles) can suffer from bioaccumulation of toxic chemicals. Some communities do not have adequate garbage collection systems, and trash lines the side of roads. In other places, garbage washes up on beaches. Kamilo Beach, in the U.S. state of Hawai'i, is littered with plastic bags and bottles carried in by the tide . The trash is dangerous to ocean life and reduces economic activity in the area. Tourism is Hawai'i’s largest industry . Polluted beaches discourage tourists from investing in the area’s hotels, restaurants, and recreational activities. Some cities incinerate , or burn, their garbage. Incinerating trash gets rid of it, but it can release dangerous heavy metals and chemicals into the air. So while trash incinerators can help with the problem of land pollution, they sometimes add to the problem of air pollution. Reducing Pollution Around the world, people and governments are making efforts to combat pollution. Recycling, for instance, is becoming more common. In recycling, trash is processed so its useful materials can be used again. Glass, aluminum cans, and many types of plastic can be melted and reused . Paper can be broken down and turned into new paper. Recycling reduces the amount of garbage that ends up in landfills, incinerators, and waterways. Austria and Switzerland have the highest recycling rates. These nations recycle between 50 and 60 percent of their garbage. The United States recycles about 30 percent of its garbage. Governments can combat pollution by passing laws that limit the amount and types of chemicals factories and agribusinesses are allowed to use. The smoke from coal-burning power plants can be filtered. People and businesses that illegally dump pollutants into the land, water, and air can be fined for millions of dollars. Some government programs, such as the Superfund program in the United States, can force polluters to clean up the sites they polluted. International agreements can also reduce pollution. The Kyoto Protocol , a United Nations agreement to limit the emission of greenhouse gases, has been signed by 191 countries. The United States, the world’s second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, did not sign the agreement. Other countries, such as China, the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, have not met their goals. Still, many gains have been made. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River, in the U.S. state of Ohio, was so clogged with oil and trash that it caught on fire. The fire helped spur the Clean Water Act of 1972. This law limited what pollutants could be released into water and set standards for how clean water should be. Today, the Cuyahoga River is much cleaner. Fish have returned to regions of the river where they once could not survive. But even as some rivers are becoming cleaner, others are becoming more polluted. As countries around the world become wealthier, some forms of pollution increase. Countries with growing economies usually need more power plants, which produce more pollutants. Reducing pollution requires environmental, political, and economic leadership. Developed nations must work to reduce and recycle their materials, while developing nations must work to strengthen their economies without destroying the environment. Developed and developing countries must work together toward the common goal of protecting the environment for future use.

How Long Does It Last? Different materials decompose at different rates. How long does it take for these common types of trash to break down?

Paper: 2-4 weeks
Orange peel: 6 months
Milk carton: 5 years
Plastic bag: 15 years
Tin can: 100 years
Plastic bottle: 450 years
Glass bottle: 500 years
Styrofoam: Never

Indoor Air Pollution The air inside your house can be polluted. Air and carpet cleaners, insect sprays, and cigarettes are all sources of indoor air pollution.

Light Pollution Light pollution is the excess amount of light in the night sky. Light pollution, also called photopollution, is almost always found in urban areas. Light pollution can disrupt ecosystems by confusing the distinction between night and day. Nocturnal animals, those that are active at night, may venture out during the day, while diurnal animals, which are active during daylight hours, may remain active well into the night. Feeding and sleep patterns may be confused. Light pollution also indicates an excess use of energy. The dark-sky movement is a campaign by people to reduce light pollution. This would reduce energy use, allow ecosystems to function more normally, and allow scientists and stargazers to observe the atmosphere.

Noise Pollution Noise pollution is the constant presence of loud, disruptive noises in an area. Usually, noise pollution is caused by construction or nearby transportation facilities, such as airports. Noise pollution is unpleasant, and can be dangerous. Some songbirds, such as robins, are unable to communicate or find food in the presence of heavy noise pollution. The sound waves produced by some noise pollutants can disrupt the sonar used by marine animals to communicate or locate food.

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Related Resources

Climate Change: Evidence and Causes: Update 2020 (2020)

Chapter: conclusion, c onclusion.

This document explains that there are well-understood physical mechanisms by which changes in the amounts of greenhouse gases cause climate changes. It discusses the evidence that the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere have increased and are still increasing rapidly, that climate change is occurring, and that most of the recent change is almost certainly due to emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activities. Further climate change is inevitable; if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, future changes will substantially exceed those that have occurred so far. There remains a range of estimates of the magnitude and regional expression of future change, but increases in the extremes of climate that can adversely affect natural ecosystems and human activities and infrastructure are expected.

Citizens and governments can choose among several options (or a mixture of those options) in response to this information: they can change their pattern of energy production and usage in order to limit emissions of greenhouse gases and hence the magnitude of climate changes; they can wait for changes to occur and accept the losses, damage, and suffering that arise; they can adapt to actual and expected changes as much as possible; or they can seek as yet unproven “geoengineering” solutions to counteract some of the climate changes that would otherwise occur. Each of these options has risks, attractions and costs, and what is actually done may be a mixture of these different options. Different nations and communities will vary in their vulnerability and their capacity to adapt. There is an important debate to be had about choices among these options, to decide what is best for each group or nation, and most importantly for the global population as a whole. The options have to be discussed at a global scale because in many cases those communities that are most vulnerable control few of the emissions, either past or future. Our description of the science of climate change, with both its facts and its uncertainties, is offered as a basis to inform that policy debate.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following individuals served as the primary writing team for the 2014 and 2020 editions of this document:

Eric Wolff FRS, (UK lead), University of Cambridge
Inez Fung (NAS, US lead), University of California, Berkeley
Brian Hoskins FRS, Grantham Institute for Climate Change
John F.B. Mitchell FRS, UK Met Office
Tim Palmer FRS, University of Oxford
Benjamin Santer (NAS), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
John Shepherd FRS, University of Southampton
Keith Shine FRS, University of Reading.
Susan Solomon (NAS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research
John Walsh, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Don Wuebbles, University of Illinois

Staff support for the 2020 revision was provided by Richard Walker, Amanda Purcell, Nancy Huddleston, and Michael Hudson. We offer special thanks to Rebecca Lindsey and NOAA Climate.gov for providing data and figure updates.

The following individuals served as reviewers of the 2014 document in accordance with procedures approved by the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences:

Richard Alley (NAS), Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University
Alec Broers FRS, Former President of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Harry Elderfield FRS, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
Joanna Haigh FRS, Professor of Atmospheric Physics, Imperial College London
Isaac Held (NAS), NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
John Kutzbach (NAS), Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin
Jerry Meehl, Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research
John Pendry FRS, Imperial College London
John Pyle FRS, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Emily Shuckburgh, British Antarctic Survey
Gabrielle Walker, Journalist
Andrew Watson FRS, University of East Anglia

The Support for the 2014 Edition was provided by NAS Endowment Funds. We offer sincere thanks to the Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Endowment for NAS Missions for supporting the production of this 2020 Edition.

F OR FURTHER READING

For more detailed discussion of the topics addressed in this document (including references to the underlying original research), see:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2019: Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate [ https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc ]
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), 2019: Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25259 ]
Royal Society, 2018: Greenhouse gas removal [ https://raeng.org.uk/greenhousegasremoval ]
U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), 2018: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States [ https://nca2018.globalchange.gov ]
IPCC, 2018: Global Warming of 1.5°C [ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15 ]
USGCRP, 2017: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume I: Climate Science Special Reports [ https://science2017.globalchange.gov ]
NASEM, 2016: Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/21852 ]
IPCC, 2013: Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group 1. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis [ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1 ]
NRC, 2013: Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18373 ]
NRC, 2011: Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts Over Decades to Millennia [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12877 ]
Royal Society 2010: Climate Change: A Summary of the Science [ https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2010/climate-change-summary-science ]
NRC, 2010: America’s Climate Choices: Advancing the Science of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12782 ]

Much of the original data underlying the scientific findings discussed here are available at:

https://data.ucar.edu/
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu
https://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu
https://ess-dive.lbl.gov/
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu
http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/hot/

Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. It is now more certain than ever, based on many lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth's climate. The Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, with their similar missions to promote the use of science to benefit society and to inform critical policy debates, produced the original Climate Change: Evidence and Causes in 2014. It was written and reviewed by a UK-US team of leading climate scientists. This new edition, prepared by the same author team, has been updated with the most recent climate data and scientific analyses, all of which reinforce our understanding of human-caused climate change.

Scientific information is a vital component for society to make informed decisions about how to reduce the magnitude of climate change and how to adapt to its impacts. This booklet serves as a key reference document for decision makers, policy makers, educators, and others seeking authoritative answers about the current state of climate-change science.

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What is climate change mitigation and why is it urgent?

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Climate change mitigation involves actions to reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.
Mitigation efforts include transitioning to renewable energy sources, enhancing energy efficiency, adopting regenerative agricultural practices and protecting and restoring forests and critical ecosystems.
Effective mitigation requires a whole-of-society approach and structural transformations to reduce emissions and limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
International cooperation, for example through the Paris Agreement, is crucial in guiding and achieving global and national mitigation goals.
Mitigation efforts face challenges such as the world's deep-rooted dependency on fossil fuels, the increased demand for new mineral resources and the difficulties in revamping our food systems.
These challenges also offer opportunities to improve resilience and contribute to sustainable development.

What is climate change mitigation?

Climate change mitigation refers to any action taken by governments, businesses or people to reduce or prevent greenhouse gases, or to enhance carbon sinks that remove them from the atmosphere. These gases trap heat from the sun in our planet’s atmosphere, keeping it warm.

Since the industrial era began, human activities have led to the release of dangerous levels of greenhouse gases, causing global warming and climate change. However, despite unequivocal research about the impact of our activities on the planet’s climate and growing awareness of the severe danger climate change poses to our societies, greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. If we can slow down the rise in greenhouse gases, we can slow down the pace of climate change and avoid its worst consequences.

Reducing greenhouse gases can be achieved by:

Shifting away from fossil fuels : Fossil fuels are the biggest source of greenhouse gases, so transitioning to modern renewable energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal power, and advancing sustainable modes of transportation, is crucial.
Improving energy efficiency : Using less energy overall – in buildings, industries, public and private spaces, energy generation and transmission, and transportation – helps reduce emissions. This can be achieved by using thermal comfort standards, better insulation and energy efficient appliances, and by improving building design, energy transmission systems and vehicles.
Changing agricultural practices : Certain farming methods release high amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, which are potent greenhouse gases. Regenerative agricultural practices – including enhancing soil health, reducing livestock-related emissions, direct seeding techniques and using cover crops – support mitigation, improve resilience and decrease the cost burden on farmers.
The sustainable management and conservation of forests : Forests act as carbon sinks , absorbing carbon dioxide and reducing the overall concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Measures to reduce deforestation and forest degradation are key for climate mitigation and generate multiple additional benefits such as biodiversity conservation and improved water cycles.
Restoring and conserving critical ecosystems : In addition to forests, ecosystems such as wetlands, peatlands, and grasslands, as well as coastal biomes such as mangrove forests, also contribute significantly to carbon sequestration, while supporting biodiversity and enhancing climate resilience.
Creating a supportive environment : Investments, policies and regulations that encourage emission reductions, such as incentives, carbon pricing and limits on emissions from key sectors are crucial to driving climate change mitigation.

Photo: Stephane Bellerose/UNDP Mauritius

Photo: Stephane Bellerose/UNDP Mauritius

Photo: La Incre and Lizeth Jurado/PROAmazonia

Photo: La Incre and Lizeth Jurado/PROAmazonia

What is the 1.5°C goal and why do we need to stick to it?

In 2015, 196 Parties to the UN Climate Convention in Paris adopted the Paris Agreement , a landmark international treaty, aimed at curbing global warming and addressing the effects of climate change. Its core ambition is to cap the rise in global average temperatures to well below 2°C above levels observed prior to the industrial era, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C.

The 1.5°C goal is extremely important, especially for vulnerable communities already experiencing severe climate change impacts. Limiting warming below 1.5°C will translate into less extreme weather events and sea level rise, less stress on food production and water access, less biodiversity and ecosystem loss, and a lower chance of irreversible climate consequences.

To limit global warming to the critical threshold of 1.5°C, it is imperative for the world to undertake significant mitigation action. This requires a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent before 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century.

What are the policy instruments that countries can use to drive mitigation?

Everyone has a role to play in climate change mitigation, from individuals adopting sustainable habits and advocating for change to governments implementing regulations, providing incentives and facilitating investments. The private sector, particularly those businesses and companies responsible for causing high emissions, should take a leading role in innovating, funding and driving climate change mitigation solutions.

International collaboration and technology transfer is also crucial given the global nature and size of the challenge. As the main platform for international cooperation on climate action, the Paris Agreement has set forth a series of responsibilities and policy tools for its signatories. One of the primary instruments for achieving the goals of the treaty is Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) . These are the national climate pledges that each Party is required to develop and update every five years. NDCs articulate how each country will contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhance climate resilience. While NDCs include short- to medium-term targets, long-term low emission development strategies (LT-LEDS) are policy tools under the Paris Agreement through which countries must show how they plan to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century. These strategies define a long-term vision that gives coherence and direction to shorter-term national climate targets.

Photo: Mucyo Serge/UNDP Rwanda

Photo: William Seal/UNDP Sudan

At the same time, the call for climate change mitigation has evolved into a call for reparative action, where high-income countries are urged to rectify past and ongoing contributions to the climate crisis. This approach reflects the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which advocates for climate justice, recognizing the unequal historical responsibility for the climate crisis, emphasizing that wealthier countries, having profited from high-emission activities, bear a greater obligation to lead in mitigating these impacts. This includes not only reducing their own emissions, but also supporting vulnerable countries in their transition to low-emission development pathways.

Another critical aspect is ensuring a just transition for workers and communities that depend on the fossil fuel industry and its many connected industries. This process must prioritize social equity and create alternative employment opportunities as part of the shift towards renewable energy and more sustainable practices.

For emerging economies, innovation and advancements in technology have now demonstrated that robust economic growth can be achieved with clean, sustainable energy sources. By integrating renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind and geothermal power into their growth strategies, these economies can reduce their emissions, enhance energy security and create new economic opportunities and jobs. This shift not only contributes to global mitigation efforts but also sets a precedent for sustainable development.

What are some of the challenges slowing down climate change mitigation efforts?

Mitigating climate change is fraught with complexities, including the global economy's deep-rooted dependency on fossil fuels and the accompanying challenge of eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. This reliance – and the vested interests that have a stake in maintaining it – presents a significant barrier to transitioning to sustainable energy sources.

The shift towards decarbonization and renewable energy is driving increased demand for critical minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earth metals. Since new mining projects can take up to 15 years to yield output, mineral supply chains could become a bottleneck for decarbonization efforts. In addition, these minerals are predominantly found in a few, mostly low-income countries, which could heighten supply chain vulnerabilities and geopolitical tensions.

Furthermore, due to the significant demand for these minerals and the urgency of the energy transition, the scaled-up investment in the sector has the potential to exacerbate environmental degradation, economic and governance risks, and social inequalities, affecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and workers. Addressing these concerns necessitates implementing social and environmental safeguards, embracing circular economy principles, and establishing and enforcing responsible policies and regulations .

Agriculture is currently the largest driver of deforestation worldwide. A transformation in our food systems to reverse the impact that agriculture has on forests and biodiversity is undoubtedly a complex challenge. But it is also an important opportunity. The latest IPCC report highlights that adaptation and mitigation options related to land, water and food offer the greatest potential in responding to the climate crisis. Shifting to regenerative agricultural practices will not only ensure a healthy, fair and stable food supply for the world’s population, but also help to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Photo: UNDP India

Photo: Nino Zedginidze/UNDP Georgia

What are some examples of climate change mitigation?

In Mauritius , UNDP, with funding from the Green Climate Fund, has supported the government to install battery energy storage capacity that has enabled 50 MW of intermittent renewable energy to be connected to the grid, helping to avoid 81,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

In Indonesia , UNDP has been working with the government for over a decade to support sustainable palm oil production. In 2019, the country adopted a National Action Plan on Sustainable Palm Oil, which was collaboratively developed by government, industry and civil society representatives. The plan increased the adoption of practices to minimize the adverse social and environmental effects of palm oil production and to protect forests. Since 2015, 37 million tonnes of direct greenhouse gas emissions have been avoided and 824,000 hectares of land with high conservation value have been protected.

In Moldova and Paraguay , UNDP has helped set up Green City Labs that are helping build more sustainable cities. This is achieved by implementing urban land use and mobility planning, prioritizing energy efficiency in residential buildings, introducing low-carbon public transport, implementing resource-efficient waste management, and switching to renewable energy sources.

UNDP has supported the governments of Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Indonesia to implement results-based payments through the REDD+ (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries) framework. These include payments for environmental services and community forest management programmes that channel international climate finance resources to local actors on the ground, specifically forest communities and Indigenous Peoples.

UNDP is also supporting small island developing states like the Comoros to invest in renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure. Through the Africa Minigrids Program , solar minigrids will be installed in two priority communities, Grand Comore and Moheli, providing energy access through distributed renewable energy solutions to those hardest to reach.

And in South Africa , a UNDP initative to boost energy efficiency awareness among the general population and improve labelling standards has taken over commercial shopping malls.

What is UNDP’s role in supporting climate change mitigation?

UNDP aims to assist countries with their climate change mitigation efforts, guiding them towards sustainable, low-carbon and climate-resilient development. This support is in line with achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly those related to affordable and clean energy (SDG7), sustainable cities and communities (SDG11), and climate action (SDG13). Specifically, UNDP’s offer of support includes developing and improving legislation and policy, standards and regulations, capacity building, knowledge dissemination, and financial mobilization for countries to pilot and scale-up mitigation solutions such as renewable energy projects, energy efficiency initiatives and sustainable land-use practices.

With financial support from the Global Environment Facility and the Green Climate Fund, UNDP has an active portfolio of 94 climate change mitigation projects in 69 countries. These initiatives are not only aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also at contributing to sustainable and resilient development pathways.

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Pacific shores, solar solutions: harnessing renewable energy in the pacific islands.

Photo: Yuichi Ishida/UNDP Timor-Leste

West Africa has great potential for solar energy. It’s time to release it.

Two men installing solar panels in Niger

Photo: UNDP Niger

Electric vehicles are driving a greener future in Viet Nam

Ho Tuan Anh delivers goods with his new e-motorbike

Ho Tuan Anh delivers goods with his new e-motorbike. Photo by: Phan Huong Giang/UNDP Viet Nam

Why the Western Balkans are choosing decarbonization

Carbon-intensive industries in Bosnia and Herzegovina are pursuing decarbonization

Photo: UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina

Six lessons on how to achieve future-smart energy efficient buildings 

Solar photovoltaic systems on roofs in Lebanon.

Solar photovoltaic systems on roofs in Lebanon. Photo: Fouad Choufany / UNDP Lebanon

Six ways to achieve sustainable energy for all

Photo: UNDP Zimbabwe

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Talking about climate change and health

The climate crisis is also an urgent and ongoing health crisis with diverse human impacts leading to physical, mental and cultural losses. Translating knowledge into action involves broad collaboration, which relies heavily on careful communication of a personal and politicized issue.

Drive to electrify

Policies and subsidies can help, and have helped, to establish the electric vehicle market. As subsidies are withdrawn and policies shift, the public will play a role in the future market infiltration.

Feeding the future world

The impacts of climate change on food production will affect us all. It is important that research and funding are available to minimize these effects and support the most vulnerable.

Registered Report for climate research

In this issue of Nature Climate Change , we publish our first Registered Report. We encourage scientists from all climate research communities to consider this format in the future.

Hoping for better

Soaring temperatures hit the headlines throughout 2023; only time will tell if the annual climate talks have pivoted from discussion and debate to meaningful progress for climate action.

Microbes in a warming world

Microorganisms and their activities are as integrated in climate change science as they are in the world around us, playing key roles related to the causes, impacts and perhaps even some solutions of climate change.

Careering ahead

Societal transition to address climate change will require many changes. As society adapts and transforms, the labour market will be altered as some established areas of employment will disappear and new areas will emerge that will need workers.

The Global Stocktake at COP28

The 28th Conference of the Parties (COP) taking place in Dubai from 30 November to 12 December 2023 will focus heavily on the first of the Global Stocktakes that were agreed upon in the Paris Agreement. In this infographic, we explain what the Global Stocktake is, how it works and the different interests and sticking points that are expected to shape the debate at COP28.

Global stocktake and beyond

COP28 will see the conclusion of the first global stocktake, which assesses efforts towards long-term climate targets. In addition to the assessment process, the stocktake could also address current problems within climate governance and interact with other policy instruments.

Choosing a path

The impacts of climate change are becoming difficult to ignore with more frequent climate extreme events across the globe. Yet, whether these events may influence individuals and society to engage in climate discussion and action is currently unclear.

Supporting adaptation

With climate change impacts increasingly being felt by more of the world’s population, adaptation efforts are urgently needed. However, similar to the unequal distribution of climate change impacts, the ability of societies to adapt is also heterogeneous.

Rough years ahead

After an early forecast, El Niño has now officially arrived. As a result, global temperatures and extreme events will be elevated, affecting health, water availability, food security, wildfires and economic productivity across the world in the coming years.

Stepping up action

Climate action is urgently needed, with reports appearing regularly highlighting the current state of the planet and scientific understanding of what is to come. There are steps being made that should be celebrated, but more is needed.

Searching for connections

Research on organism responses to climate change needs to incorporate biological interactions, which requires consideration of the trade-offs between scale and resolution.

Modern food emissions

The modern food industry is reshaping society and contributing to global warming. Mitigation efforts at different levels are needed to promote environmental and human health.

Aviation contributes to global emissions, yet the sector is lagging behind in decarbonization efforts. A combination of technology alongside societal change could provide a path to emission reductions.

Methane possible

Reducing methane emissions from fossil fuels, agriculture and waste is key to achieving climate goals. Technological advances and scientifically grounded feasibility assessments of mitigation initiatives may illuminate the path to success.

Behaviour as leverage

Behaviour change is essential for effective solutions to climate threats. Thus, policy-relevant behavioural science studies are needed for a shift towards human-centred climate actions.

Food insecurity

Climate change is a confounding factor that can affect agriculture and food security in many different ways. Climate-resilient food systems are needed to ensure food security and to support mitigation efforts.

Nearly two years into the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science, research, including some featured in this month’s issue, shows that there is still a wealth of scientific secrets to uncover in the ocean depths.

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