Blog 9

The world is facing many problems today. Overpopulation, food shortages, species extinction, deforestation, etc. The list goes on. Makes me wonder about the future of our planet, as well as ourselves. As sadly, there is no real solution for many of these problems as of today. The world population is at 7 billion people, with nearly one billion classified as living in "chronic starvation". In the future things are simply predicted to get worse. As the global population increases, our food supplies dwindle. Food scarcity is already causing global prices of food to rise, the supply just cannot meet the demand anymore. We bought ourselves some time with the green revolution of the 1950s, but now it seems that that time is running out.

We have over-fished the oceans causing 90% of all large fish to be gone from them. We have polluted both the air and water, and it is estimated that due to the ensuing ocean acidification the ocean may eventually be uninhabitable by anything but microbes. So we can either use our sophisticated technology to rapidly exterminate all fish from the earth-- thus compounding our food shortage-- or we can poison them by turning their water into acid. At the same time as this can be happening, we can be confidant that the starving people across Asia and Africa will become ever more desperate as rainfall patterns change and dry areas become even more desiccated then they were before. To compound all of this, we are facing a massive die off of species.

According to Jean-Christophe Vié, Deputy Head of IUCN’s Species Programme this is a serious problem as well. “Think of fisheries without fishes, logging without trees, tourism without coral reefs or other wildlife, crops without pollinators,” says Vié. “Imagine the damage to our economies and societies if they were lost. All the plants and animals that make up Earth’s amazing wildlife have a specific role and contribute to essentials like food, medicine, oxygen, pure water, crop pollination, carbon storage and soil fertilization. Economies are utterly dependent on species diversity. We need them all, in large numbers. We quite literally cannot afford to lose them.

Well I guess all of this means that the world is going to need to make some changes in the following years, as we can't afford to think of this task as a simple doddle.

Vocab:
Desiccated: Dehydrated
Doddle: An easy task