Effects that Ecosystems have on Humans

Introduction

·         Changes in ecosystem services influence all components of human well-being, including the basic material needs for good life, health, social relations and freedom of choice and action.

·         Humans are fully dependant on earth’s ecosystem and the services that they provide, such as food, clean water, disease regulation, climate change, spiritual fulfilment and aesthetic enjoyment.

Food Security

·         Lack of conservation of the Earth natural ecosystems will affect the four dimensions of food security; food availability, accessibility, food utilisation and food systems stability.

·         It will have an impact on human health, livelihood assets, food production and distribution channels, as well as changing, purchasing power and market flows.

·         Its impacts will be both short term, resulting from more frequent and more intense extreme weather events, and long term, caused by changing temperatures and precipitation patterns.

·         “The history of the world, me sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat” Sweeney Todd.

·         Unfortunately throughout the world there is already evidence of food wars gripping many nations as due to the decreasing numbers of crops harvested each year throughout the world many mouths are left hungry at dinner time.

·         If we continue without hesitation to the lack of conservation of our earth’s natural resources some day it won’t be just underdeveloped countries that are left starving once night falls but our own too.

Water security

·         Today the earth’s population is growing more and more everyday and is well over the 7 billion mark as it is today, however over 2 billion of the world’s  population lives without clean drinkable and useable water each and every day. Furthermore predictions show that by the year 2025 ⅔ of the world’s population will face water security. The lacking concern for conservation of the earth’s natural resources brings us each day further and further towards the end of clean, drinkable water with the flick of a tap. The River Jordan is an example of the future of the earth’s natural conserves of fresh water and is slowly but surely drying up which affects the communities who live close by as they would use the water for drinking, washing and cooking. Over the past few decades, Israel, Jordan and Syria have diverted about 98% of the River Jordan and its tributaries for drinking water and agricultural use. Only 700 million to about 1billion cubic feet flows through the river today, a tiny fraction of the 45 billion cubic feet that used to surge through before the 1930s when the 1^st dam was built.

Environmental Damage

·         As we see each year, the news discusses more and more damage through natural disasters; these disasters cause many problems for people throughout the world and consequently kill lots of citizens of areas that are affected.

·         Climate change is linked in with the rise and severity of these natural disasters. Scientists at a conference in London in 2009 illustrated the links between climate change and natural disasters; they referenced the fact that rising outputs of “carbon dioxide from vehicles, factories and power stations will not only affect the atmosphere and the sea but will alter the geology of the earth”.

Consequences to Health

·         Daily there come more and more evidence between the correlation of climate change and consequences to our health.

·         Milder winters would reduce the normal seasonal peak mortality in some temperate developed countries and warming in drying of already hot countries would reduce the viability of mosquitoes.

·         Modelling of climate change effects on cereal grain yields indicates a future world of regional winners and losers, with a 5–10% increase in the global number of underfed people.97 The conflicts and the migrant and refugee flows likely to result from these wider-ranging effects would, typically, increase infectious diseases, malnutrition, mental health problems, and injury and violent death. Future assessments of the health effects of climate change should attempt order-of-magnitude estimates of these more diffuse risks to health.

Consequences to the Economy

·         Food security it is a vital need for all of us humans to survive; however going the way we are with little concern for the conservation of the earth’s natural resources. Climate change consequently affects the number of harvests per year, the number of local fisheries that are affected by the deaths of many fish, furthering the costs lost by the rising effects of climate change.

·         Water security along with food security is a basic need for all of us to survive, not only us but the ecosystems themselves to survive. Rising sea levels and drainage of lakes, rivers and streams throughout the world. The dry ups of rivers and so on affects lots of people’s lives and subsequently costs lots of money to create sustainable livelihoods for those who cannot access clean drinkable water daily.

·         As already shown climate change affects our earth and causes it to battle out against itself creating natural disasters, consequence in some times billions of pound worth of reparations to be made.

·         Consequences to health are on obvious money burner due to the fact that it costs governments billion per year to supply medicine to help the common cold; a climate change magnifies health risks therefore again costing money to cure such illnesses.

Conclusion

·         Conservation of the Earth’s Natural Resources and Biodiversity should be a vital part of each and every part of our day to day lives, examples that I’ve shown are only a few consequences of the fact that if we don't change there will be no need to change because there will be nothing to fix. The biggest hold back for creating change is money. Money money, money, is what controls our lives, what we eat, drink, how we work, were we live who we associate ourselves with, everything that we do revolves around money. Climate change is exactly the same, its money that has created all this damage to our planet, either starting with consumerism leading the way due to without the need to shop, shop, there would be no need for countless numbers of factories polluting our planet, countless numbers of brand new cars and other gadgets that send pollution into our atmosphere. The ecosystem provides over 30 billion pounds per year towards the economy of the planet and if governments worldwide were prepared to spend even a fraction of that per year we would be able to sustain a viable planet that we could live on with only a small few changes on our outlook to as how we live.