Mankind and Environmental Damage

Posted by John Blatchford Sep 9, 2009

Habitat loss is bringing many species close to extinction. Urban and industrial development, pollution, and climate change all play their part, and often the combination of effects is greater than predicted.

Some of my recent articles look at specific cases to show how this all works.

Royal Society Lecture 2009

The coral reef crisis shows the enormous effects that increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide can have on the marine environment. ('Coralline algae' looks in a bit more detail at what might happen soon.)

The full report can be downloaded as a pdf and read at leisure – it makes scary reading!

The talk Professor John Veron gave to the Royal Society is also available as a webcast – ‘Is the Great Barrier Reef on deathrow?’.

Carbon dioxide enters the oceans through the recently discovered ocean surface film, and the implications of this on water acidification are not yet understood.

Urban Development

The wild axolotl is close to extinction, largely due to the fact that its only habitat is now surrounded by Mexico City. It could easily be reintroduced from captive stocks, but this might not be a good idea (explained in ‘Reintroducing endangered species often dangerous’).

Loss of mangrove forests worldwide is another serious problem, and selecting a suitable ‘flagship species’ is suggested (in this case the Proboscis Monkey).

Illegal logging is responsible for loss of forest habitats, and it is an ironic fact that many newly discovered rainforest species are endangered the moment they are discovered. My Kipunji article looks at this in a bit more detail.

Climate Change

Increasing temperatures affect the distribution of many creatures, and sometimes seemingly trivial changes can have surprising effects. The relationship between an ant and the Large Blue butterfly show one such unexpected consequence. See also my article about the effects of climate change in the arctic tundra.

Synergies

Very often it is difficult to point to any single factor that is causing habitat loss or endangering a species. This is because the accumulation of many small changes can add up to a crisis – the small stresses work together ‘synergistically’. In other words the combined effect is greater than would be expected from simply adding all the small effects together.

This is very well explained in the document produced by the working party studying the coral reef crisis. It is essential reading – download it!