The Global Environmental Development Platform

 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

In some #African countries where oil is produced on a very large scale, Nigeria, for instance, environmental and human rights activist organizations at non-governmental level have taken the initiative within their framework and capacity to curb and fight against oil spills in water bodies in rural communities, where oil exploration and drilling activities are and have been at its peak. These human rights and non-profit organizations whose actions have been geared towards curbing the excesses of environmental pollution and degradation, have been able to a minute extent ensure clean up of these oil polluted areas, and seek compensation and also reparation for the affected indigenes and defunct communities. Nevertheless, despite these measures adopted in these regions, the gruesome effects of oil #pollution can still be seen and felt. The indigenes have been forced to evacuate and abandon these coastal regions because they can no longer farm their lands for food and fish their rivers for

The first real concern with water pollution came about in the late 19th century. Then, the industrial Revolution at the time brought about an immense growth of towns and cities which resulted in urbanization. The common practice then and which is still seen in many indigenous regions of the developing world like Africa and Asia, was to dump sewage into the nearest stream, and this subsequently turned many rivers into cesspools. Thus, much of the cities’ and towns’ water were drawn from these same rivers and this resulted in great epidemics of cholera, typhoid and other water borne diseases.  London’s history provides a classic example. The sewage level turned the River Thames into a mass of filth, and twenty thousand Londoners died of cholera outbreaks in 1849 and 1853 respectively. Also, at the same time, typhoid epidemics hit many cities in the United States. Circumstantial evidence indicated that these were transmitted through polluted drinking water. But there was no real understa

Sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future to meet their needs. Environmental sustainability therefore can be defined as the responsible interaction with the environment to avoid depletion or degradation of natural resources which allows for long term environmental quality. Pollution of the environment as can be seen from the impending factors from the previous article I wrote, assumes diverse forms and can be categorized into four major classes which are water pollution, air pollution, land pollution and noise pollution. These however, represent serious potential threats to environmental quality or they show, and convene the problems and complexities of anticipating and avoiding undesirable human impacts on the environment. Water pollution is very dangerous and poses a threat to human, acquatic, animal, and plant life. Several times each day, we turn a handle to produce a flow of clean water. By pressing or turning another ha