The Global Environmental Development Platform

  Particulate matter causes the frequent painting of houses, cleaning of clothes and washing of cars. Particulate matter, nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide are all contributing factors to decreased visibility.  This however, presents a hazard to operators of aircraft, automobiles and boats. A study revealed that levels of harmful microscopic particulate matter known as PM 2.5 and the pollutant which is smaller than PM 2.5 micrometers in diameter is considered particularly dangerous as it can lodge deep into the lungs and pass onto other organs and the blood stream, causing serious health risks.  The effects of air pollution on weathers and climate aren’t far fetched. Scientists have definitely established a relationship between air pollution and weather. Each can affect the other in numerous ways. Wind and temperatures for instance affect the quantities and extent of pollutants in the air. Strong winds are air currents which may scatter pollutants in both vertical and horizontal directio

The effects of air pollution are wide and aren’t far fetched. People, animals, plant life and even inert materials can and are affected by this demise. History tells that in October 1948, a stagnant fog heavy with pollution blanketed a small industrial town of Donora, Pennsylvania.The fog lasted for four days, and by the time it had cleared, six thousand of the town’s fourteen thousand people were sick and twenty had died. Four years later, a killer smog in London had caused an estimated four thousand deaths. In 1970, however, more than eight thousand people in Tokyo, Japan needed medical treatment for eye, nose, and throat irritations when heavy white smog containing sulfurous acid covered the city for five days. The most serious and immediate menace of air pollution lies in its physical effects on human beings even though it is quite difficult to access the long term health effects of air pollution. Yet there’s no doubt that ailments such as emphysema, chronic bronchitis, bronchia

In the past decade, China with the largest economy in the world has seen the rise of acute carbon emissions in the atmosphere. With the advancement of technology, major cities in China, like Hong Kong and Beijing have been heavily plagued with smog and the culture of wearing nose masks has since been the norm long before the Corona virus pandemic hit the globe. In Nigeria, Warri, a major oil producing city has been also plagued with smog in recent times as most mornings, the air can be seen to be thick and dense, making buildings hardly visible against a backdrop of thick smog especially during the wet season.  However, like water bodies, the atmosphere can cleanse itself as long as it is not overloaded and overwhelmed with pollutants produced in large quantities and concentrations. Cities often accumulate pollutants both because they produce them in such large amounts and because cities are often located in river valleys along base or on level areas beside mountains. Most of these

 The pollutants of air are  numerous and this is as a result of byproducts of an advanced technological society. As long as man has lived in cities, he has and will continue to pollute the air. Major cities around the globe must now strive to deal with dangerously rising levels of air pollution. With the advent of population migration and growth; urbanization, which is the agglomeration of people in space, the rate of the acquisition of automobiles for instance, has quadrupled over the past century, that is from the 1950’s up till now. And as such, the rate of air pollution has also quadrupled. Noted also, smog from these cities in recent times especially before the Covid-19 pandemic, drifted into many sub-urban and rural areas where it has been fed by cars, incinerators, and heating and generating plants. Urban air pollution was once considered a problem of merely smoke in the air and the main source of the smoke obviously was industry which burned great quantities of coal, oil and

 #Heat is an industrial water pollutant. Electric generating plants, nuclear power plants and many other manufacturing operations require enormous amount of water for cooling. Water needed for factory operations is drawn from lakes or rivers. Afterwards, the hot water is discharged back into the same lake or river, and if this water is hot enough to raise average temperatures in a large volume of the stream or lake, this can radically upset the ecosystem. Plants and animals adapted to a certain temperature are affected and may be unable to survive when the temperature rises a degree or two above the upper limit of that range. In most cases, as in gas flaring, temperatures are raised so high that fish and other aquatic mammals migrate to calmer and cooler waters. The result is a drastic reduction of population of these animals in that region, and subsequently the economics of that region is also brutally affected in terms of fishing and fish trading. For instance, the rivers in the rura

Industrial pollution is  a menace to the aquatic ecosystem. Most factories discharge three or four times more oxygen demanding wastes than sewers and they dump poisons into the water as well. Despite the shift from the industrial era to a more integrated approach as regards knowledge and the advancement of technology, this has and can be seen to remedy some of the impacts of industrial wastes. However, some sources may simply have been eliminated. The average wastes gotten from the modern sulphate, pulp and paper process is less than one tenth of what it was from the sulfite process formerly used in paper mills. So in other words, technology has contributed largely to industrial processes to this regard. Still, new and complex chemical processes are on a frequent basis developed and have increased the possibility of releasing dangerous chemical pollutants that are hard to detect and control.  Most industries are always over eager to introduce new chemicals and materials into their pro

When a town grows into a city, or when many towns and cities are built along the same river, the #ecosystem is overwhelmed by the large amount of #wastes. So #sewage treatment becomes absolutely necessary. Modern sewage technology shows an understanding and application of part of the #aquatic ecosystem. Sewage treatment plants for instance, utilize the same microorganisms that serve as decomposers in natural bodies of water. But as #urban growth and #population have continued to increase, it has become apparent that sewage treatment technology is only partly in tune with the ecosystem. However, the nitrates, phosphates and other nutrients released from the organic matter by the #microorganisms in the sewage treatment plants are passed on through the ecosystem where they stimulate the growth of #algae. Thus, the end result is #eutrophication. Algae overgrowth has been a major factor, for instance, in the break down of the ecosystem in some of North America’s lakes such as the #Lake Erie