‘We Are handed towards disaster if we can’t get our warming in check’-Alice C.Hill,CFR Senior for energy and environment.

Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. The planet Earth, a majestic 4.54 billion years old, was once covered in verdant green, but the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations finds the earth has now lost one-third of its forest through human activities.

WWF estimates such land use changes have caused wildlife decline by 69 per cent in the last five decades. The UN finds 75 per cent of the earth’s land is degraded while its oceans are 30 per cent more acidic now, choked by plastic and chemical waste.

Advertisement

The former American vice president and Nobel Laureate Al Gore in his famous book entitled The Future has pointed out multiple threats confronting Planet Earth: erosion of fertile land at unsustainable rates each inch of topsoil lost diminishes grain yields by around 6 per cent; increasing desertification of grasslands; a slowing rate of agricultural productivity since the Green Revolution in the second half of the 20th century, the loss of a significant amount of the world’s remaining plant genetic diversity as much as three quarters of all plant genetic diversity may have been already lost; erratic and less predictable precipitation patterns are associated with global warming vis- à-vis climate change which leads to less frequent but larger downpours, interrupting longer periods of deeper drought, and the looming impact of catastrophic heat stress on important food crops threatening the ability of the world to expand food supplies.

Global warming vis-à-vis climate change is a slow-moving crisis. To be more precise, it is a very fast-moving crisis from the perspective of geological epochs, but very slow from the point of view of daily events. And also from the political calendar. No........

© The Statesman