IMPACT OF HUMAN
ACTIVITIES ON
ENVIRONMENTAL
QUALITY
1
●
Since Homo sapiens live on the
planet of earth c.a.180,000 years
ago, human activities have been
increased that cause great impacts
to environment
2
Major human cultural changes
and its impact to environment
Human Cultural
changes
Major human activities
Humans were mostly
hunter gatherers
Hunting
Food gathering
Agricultural revolution
Settlement and agriculture development,
domestication of animal, city development
(urbanization)
Industrial revolution
Development of industrial process, mining and
fossil fuel production , increase the use of
pesticide and chemical fertilizer,
Information and
globalization revolution
Rapid technology and information
development, globalization on many aspects
3
Agricultural revolution
Settled Agriculture
●
Nomadic hunting and food gathering
Settled agriculture (animal
domestication and plants cultivation)
● Settled agriculture has increased food
supply that led to support more
people, but decrease the environment
quality
4
Human activities for settled agriculture and its
impact to environmental
●
●
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Peoples Cut down vast forest to supply wood
for fuel and building material€ soil erosion
Plowed up large expanses of grassland to
grow crops turning fertile land to desert
Built irrigation systems to transfer water from
one place to another€ continous avaibility of
water for plants
Such activities cause extensive land clearing
which degraded the quality of ecosystems
5
Modern agriculture has harmful impacts on
air, soil, water, and biodiversity resources
6
Raising livestock to produce meat by open
grazing could destroyed ecosystems
Lightly grazed
Overgrazed
7
City development and
urbanization
Urbanization: the formation of villages,
town, and cities. Some villages grew into
towns and cities, which served as center
for trade, government and business
● Towns and cities concentrated sewage
and other wastes, polluted the air and
water
●
8
Industrial revolution
●
Represented shift from dependence on
renewable energy wood to nonrenewable fossil fuels (first coal, later oil
and natural gas) this led to switch from
handmade goods in small scale production
to large scale machine-made goods in
industries cities
9
Effects of extracting, processing and using of
mineral / fossil fuels
10
Using fossil fuels can leak into
the ocean ecosystems
●
a large amount Liquid fossil fuels can
seeps into ocean
◦ Tanker accidents
◦ Waste oil dumped from activities on land
Oil spill onto the ocean and kill a
number of organisms
11
Spill of oil fossil fuel over the sea
12
Surface and subsurface mining cause
pollution and degradation of stream and
groundwater by runoff of acids
13
Burning fossil fuels produces billions tones of
CO2, one of greenhouse gases that contribute
global warming
climate change
Projected emissions of three important greenhouse gases as
a result of human activities
14
Several Impact of human activities cause a major issue:
CLIMATE CHANGE
EFFECT of CLIMATE CHANGE to HUMAN HEALTH
15
Building roads is one of human activities that
cause destruction and degradation land and
ecosystem
16
Soil Degradation
Areas of degraded soil of the world
Controlling pest population by spraying
a pesticides
●
●
About 2.5 million tons
of pesticides are use yearly in
developed and developing
countries to control pests such as
insects
The use of pesticides threat
human health:
-According WHO, nearly 3 million agricultural workers
in developing countries are seriously poisoned by
pesticides each year, estimated 180,000 deaths
-In developed country such as USA, 300,000 farms
worker suffer from pesticides related illnesses each
year
18
Decline of marine species (mostly fish)
About 75% of the
world’s commercial
oceanic fish stocks are
in decline
Overfishing
Pollution, habitat degradation
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Overload wastes into water cause
degradation of water quality
20
Water use
●
Only a tiny amount of world’s abundant water is
available as fresh water (2.6%)
●
Water is collected, purified, recycled, distributed
fresh water available
Human withdraw fresh water from rivers, lakes, and
aquifers for cities, residences and industry uses, and
also to irrigate cropland
●
21
Global water use
The use of too much water by human may
effect to the avaibility of fresh water
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Due to large population, human withdraw
underground water faster than it is replenished
depletion of fresh water
If it is happened near a coast, salt water can
intrudes into aquifer and contaminate drinking
water along coastal area
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Too much water: flooding
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Natural flooding primarily caused by heavy rain and
degradation of water holding capacity of soil
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Natural flooding have benefits:
- provide productive farmland
- recharge groundwater
- refill wetland
However, each year flood kills thousands of people and
cause property damage
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Since 1960 human activities have contributed a severe
flood damage by:
-removing water-absorbing vegetation (hillsides)
-draining wetland that absorb floodwater
-living on flood plain
25
Flood Plain
Hillside
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Nuclear power
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Produce energy: produce electricity at much lower cost than coal
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High-level radioactive wastes (stored in pool of water at plant site)
●
Nuclear disaster happened at Ukraine (Chernobyl nuclear power
plant) in 1986:
- killed 3,576 ~ 32,000 people
- a series of explosions caused a huge
radioactive d cloud spread over Ukraine,
Russia and other parts of Europe
- forced 40,000 people to leave their homes,
probably never to return
●
Global nuclear power plant peaked in the 1990s and is projected to
decline
28
Information and globalization
revolution
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Technologies such as telephone,
radio, television, computers, the
internet, remote sensing satellites
providing people to access people to
have much more information on a
global scale
29
Positive affect of information and
globalization revolution
●
Allow us to respond environmental problems
more effectively and rapidly
● Allow us to use remote sensing satellites to
survey resources and monitor changes in the
world’s forests, grassland, oceans, rivers, polar
regions, cities, and other system
● Can reduce pollution and environmental
degradation by substituting data for materials
and energy and communication for transportation
● Allow environmental researchers and activist to
exchange data and information rapidly
30
Negative affect of information
and globalization revolution
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IT could cause confusion, distraction and
sense of hopelessness as rapidly
growing environmental information
Increase environmental degradation and
decrease cultural diversity as a
globalized economy spreads over most
of the earth and homogenizes the
world’s cultures including disease
Creating and introducing new
technologies much faster than we ca
evaluate their impacts
31
Infectious disease
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Spread by air, water, food, body fluids,
some insects, and other nonhuman
carrier (vector)
Human activities such as International
traveling can rapidly spread diseases
such as flu, measles, chlorella,
smallpox and AIDS
Migration to uninhabited rural areas and
deforestation in tropical country can
expose to disease spread by vectors
such as malaria
32
Humans activities affected
biodiversity
34
Kill endangered animal cause
depletion of biodiversity
Consume such protein endanger
species of Gorilla
Confiscated products from
endangered species
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