Like I have often said, the battle with global warming and climate change can only be won only if we get to the root causes of these reverse trends. We can’t talk about ameliorating or mitigating these situations without first addressing the issues that brought about these changes.
First and foremost, the issue of migration has to be dealt with. This I believe is the major root cause of global warming. There are many reasons why people move from one city, town or region to another, and there are also factors that propel or pull people from one place to another.
The search or quest for better living conditions is one of them. When a region or city has become the center of economic and commercial activities, this has a tendency to pull people from other regions to it. Then a trend begins. Migration from less, or no economic or commerce regions begin to occur and you find people moving in droves from the country or villages to the cities and towns in search of business, better jobs, housing and living conditions in general. This is not so bad if you look at from an economic or commercial point.
But when migrations like these occur over a long period of time, let’s say ten years, there will be a build up of the population density in that area. And that region has slowly evolved into an urban center. Because, in the space of those ten years, the man made environment has been built most often with resources from the natural environment. There are likely to be houses, offices, schools, malls, marketplaces, government infrastructures, companies, libraries, shops and stores, leisure and recreation centers, and restaurants. These have been built by materials either taken out from beneath the earth’s surface and also from the forests. And so, there have been minuses made in the natural environment in order to build the man made environment. At this stage, we can boldly say that urbanization has reached its full potential.
Now, urbanization is the agglomeration of people in space. This occurs as a result of the pull factors mentioned earlier on, to a particular region. When there’s a clustering of people in an area, city or region over a period of time for purely commercial or economic reasons, and more and more keep migrating to that ‘space’ or place, there is definitely going to be more than the stipulated number of people per square meter of area. Then, we can now say a region or city is overpopulated.
Overpopulation of a town, city or region means that there is already an overuse of the natural resources at their disposal. Natural resource depletion is a major phenomenon in overpopulated areas. When there are too many people of say a million people using resources meant for a quarter of that number, which is two hundred and fifty thousand people, one can only imagine the scenario of such consequences. Clean water, air, available land and space; clean environment, vegetation cover and forest reserves are all on the decline.
In these cases, air pollution is very rampant. When there are too many people living in a city, and these people drive cars, use public transportation, and in places like Africa, where power outages are very rampant, and the inhabitants or indigenes have to generate power using electric power plants to supply electricity, air pollution in such areas is at its peak.
Densely populated areas release more green gases into the atmosphere because the carbon footprint of individuals living in such areas is much higher than their counterparts in low populated regions. When these green gases are trapped in the atmosphere, surface temperatures increase drastically and that area or region experiences a greater measure of heat over time as more and more green gases especially carbon, continue to be trapped in the atmosphere. And this leads to global warming. When this occurs and the atmospheric conditions of that region is altered giving rise to drastic changes in weather patterns, we can now say there’s climate change.
Migration, urbanization and overpopulation are a combined cause of global warming and climate change. If incessant migration, urbanization and overpopulation can be checked by the government and stakeholders in countries that have major cities and towns prone to migration which could lead to more overpopulated areas, put in place policies to reduce these trends, this will go a long way to combating global warming.
Comments
Post a Comment