The Global Environmental Development Platform

 Countries with the largest economies and consumer patterns in the world today, often have the most serious solid wastes problem. Household refuse, commercial rubbish, industrial wastes and contraction debris total more than 700,000 metric tonnes daily in the United States alone.  Among the major methods of solid wastes disposal are open dumps, sanitary landfills, incineration, ocean dumping, feeding garbage to swine and composting. Seepage  of rain water through these wastes in dump and land fills may result in pollution of underground water. Incineration pollutes the air. Ocean dumping damages ecosystems in parts of the sea over a lengthy period of time, and the African environment is characterized by the above mentioned. In smaller towns and cities in most developing countries in the continent, you can find on every street and even along the roads, solid wastes litters. A lot of people just dump household refuse and solid wastes directly on the streets and even on the ...

  The next category of pollution we are going to be looking at or considering this time around is land misuse and land pollution. A lot of  current environmental problems have been caused or aggravated by the careless use of land and natural resources.  Overgrazing Of ranch-land has led to erosion. Draining and dredging wetlands has also led to the disappearance of coastal wildlife. Dams which are structures erected to obstruct the flow of water solely for the purpose of generating electricity prevents rivers from carrying sediments to the ocean and as a result beaches are disappearing and are being degraded.  In times past, strip mining carried out in the United States has been less expensive, faster and more efficient than underground mining. But this activity has transformed large pacts of land in Pennsylvania, Ohio,Virginia, Kentucky, and other states into a maze of deep pits and huge soil mounds. Once the land has been altered and exposed by strip miners, it is ...

  Air pollution can be detected, measured and analyzed using a number of methods. First of all, in order to detect gases, a sample of air can be analyzed chemically. Electronic devices make rapid and continuous monitoring. The degree of visibility is another indication of pollution.  The Ringelmann chart can be easily used to determine the quantity of smoke in the air. This chart bears a series of numbered shadings ranging from zero which is white, then to five, which is black. An observer simply matches the smokiness of the sky with the shading on the chart that corresponds most closely to what he sees. Major areas around the world have established monitoring systems that provide readings of pollution levels at various places within these cities.  A global network of monitoring stations has thus been established to this effect. This has made extensive use of ground weather stations, earth satellites, computing, the internet and social media to help identify potentially d...

  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 horiz...

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 t...

 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...