Climate change is undoubtedly the biggest threat facing mankind in the new century. An issue that has been ignored for far too long and has recently exploded out of control, bringing with it other sustainability challenges. What does this mean? It implies that environmental issues related to climate change are linked to those related to sustainability in a chain in which each link is essential.
It is exactly to climate change that a number of other issues are linked, which are often put in the background and which, instead, need to be addressed immediately and seriously because they threaten the further development of life on earth. Besides climate, what are the other threats to sustainability? Let us shed some light on what other environmental problems need our attention.
Threats to the Planet
Climate change in recent times is becoming more and more evident, rapidly increasing in every corner of the planet. Temperatures are going wild, the seasons no longer exist with intense heat and sudden, strong, adverse weather events.
For this reason, Europe has drawn up a road map in which a series of green goals are listed to be achieved by 2050, the date by which the achievement of climate neutrality has been established. These goals can only be addressed through the integration in all schools and the implementation of environmental education in everyday life. Not only climate-related issues, but all-encompassing environmental issues, which, like climate change, are urgent issues to be addressed.
First and foremost, the loss of biodiversity: more and more (today about one million) animals and plant species are threatened with extinction on earth. Every single loss leads to changes in the perfect natural balance created on the planet, undermining human health and social needs. The major cause? Man and his activities.
Not to be outdone is the pollution that affects not only the air but also water and soil. It is a silent but deadly menace that causes 7 million deaths each year by contaminating the atmosphere, a figure similar to that caused by Covid-19 during the pandemic. Water contamination, then, does not only depend on industrial waste. We now know that it is aggravated by the presence of micro plastics that humans ingest through water and food.
Drought and deforestation
Among many other threats compromising the sustainability of our planet there are droughts and water scarcity, which are direct consequences of an increasingly torrid and dry climate that is putting more and more strain on the planet’s water resources, which are slowly running out. On the other hand, there is the mismanagement of water by man, who has been wasting it for a long time with wrong habits and ways of doing things.
In addition to environmental changes, there is also deforestation. With fewer and fewer trees, more greenhouse gases escaping into the atmosphere for a planet that is becoming increasingly warm. But this is not all: the reduction in forests, the planets green lung, is followed by other environmental stresses with landscapes that are changing, living species that are slowly dying out and others, stronger ones, which out of a spirit of survival migrate in search of more favourable environments, but affecting other environmental balances.
