Environmental issues and their causes in Pakistan and their solutions

Introduction to environment:
the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates is known as
environment. The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring
naturally. The term is most often applied to the earth or some part of earth. This
environment encompasses the interaction of all living species, climate, weather, and natural
resources that affect human survival and economic activity.

Biophysical environment:

The biophysical environment is the biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population,
and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development and
evolution. The biophysical environment can vary in scale from microscopic to global in extent.

A healthy environment is an absolute necessity for the well-being of all organisms, including man.
All our needs, big and small are being met by the environment. However, man having reached the
pinnacle of evolution is trying to bring about changes in the environment to suit his convenience.
Unfortunately, this convenience is temporary. In the long run, man is losing out on a healthy
environment.
Environmental issues in Pakistan:

Environmental issues are harmful effects of human activity on the biophysical

environment. Environmental protection is a practice of protecting the natural environment on
individual, organizational or governmental levels, for the benefit of both the environment and
humans. Environmentalism, a social and environmental movement, addresses environmental
issues through advocacy, education and activism.
The carbon dioxide equivalent of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere has already exceeded
400 parts per million (NOAA) (with total "long-term" GHG exceeding 455 parts per million).
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report) This level is considered a tipping point. "The
amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that can potentially
cause dangerous climate change. We are already at risk of many areas of pollution...It's not next
year or next decade, it's now." Report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA)
"Climate disasters are on the rise. Around 70 percent of disasters are now climate related – up from
around 50 percent from two decades ago.
These disasters take a heavier human toll and come with a higher price tag. In the last decade, 2.4
billion people were affected by climate related disasters, compared to 1.7 billion in the previous
decade. The cost of responding to disasters has risen tenfold between 1992 and 2008. Destructive
sudden heavy rains, intense tropical storms, repeated flooding and droughts are likely to increase,
as will the vulnerability of local communities in the absence of strong concerted action." "Climate
change is not just a distant future threat. It is the main driver behind rising humanitarian needs and
we are seeing its impact. The number of people affected and the damages inflicted by extreme
weather has been unprecedented. "followings are the some major environmental issues in Pakistan
1. Pollution
a. Air Pollution
b. Water Pollution
c. Noise Pollution
d. Thermal Pollution
e. Soil Pollution
f. Light Pollution
2. Human overpopulation
3. Deforestation
4. Nuclear issues
5. Global warming
Human overpopulation:
Human overpopulation occurs when the ecological footprint of a human population in a specific
geographical location exceeds the carrying capacity of the place occupied by that group.
Overpopulation can further be viewed, in a long term perspective, as existing when a population
cannot be maintained given the rapid depletion of non-renewable resources or given the
degradation of the capacity of the environment to give support to the population.
The term human overpopulation refers to the relationship between the entire human
population and its environment: the Earth, or to smaller geographical areas such as countries.
Overpopulation can result from an increase in births, a decline in mortality rates, an increase
in immigration, or an unsustainable biome and depletion of resources. It is possible for very
sparsely populated areas to be overpopulated if the area has a meagre or non-existent capability to
sustain life (e.g. a desert). Advocates of population moderation cite issues like quality of
life, carrying capacity and risk of starvation as a basis to argue against continuing high human
population growth and for population decline. Scientists suggest that the human impact on the
environment as a result of overpopulation, profligate consumption and proliferation of technology
has pushed the planet into a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene.
Causes:
From a historical perspective, technological revolutions have coincided with population
explosions. There have been three major technological revolutions – the tool-making revolution,
the agricultural revolution, and the industrial revolution – all of which allowed humans more
access to food, resulting in subsequent population explosions.[78][79] For example, the use of tools,
such as bow and arrow, allowed primitive hunters greater access to high energy foods (e.g. animal
meat). Similarly, the transition to farming about 10,000 years ago greatly increased the overall
food supply, which was used to support more people. Food production further increased with
the industrial revolution as machinery, fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides were used to increase
land under cultivation as well as crop yields. In short, similar to bacteria that multiply in response
to increased food supply, humans have increased their population as soon as food became more
abundant as a result of technological innovations.
Significant increases in human population occur whenever the birth rate exceeds the death rate for
extended periods of time. Traditionally, the fertility rate is strongly influenced by cultural and
social norms that are rather stable and therefore slow to adapt to changes in the social,
technological, or environmental conditions. For example, when death rates fell during the 19th and
20th century – as a result of improved sanitation, child immunizations, and other advances in
medicine – allowing more newborns to survive, the fertility rate did not adjust downward fast
enough, resulting in significant population growth. Prior to these changes, seven out of ten children
died before reaching reproductive age, while today about 95% of newborns in industrialized
nations reach adulthood.
Solutions:

Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural
world, however, it's not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that
do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would
necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default of
our culture. Derrick Jensen. Endgame, 2006

There are several solutions and mitigation measures that have the potential to reduce
overpopulation. Some solutions are to be applied on a global planetary level (e.g.,
via UN resolutions), some to be applied on a local government, state, city, or other organization
level, and some are to be applied on a family or an individual level. Some of the mitigations are
ways to implement social norms. Overpopulation is an issue that threatens the state of the
environment and therefore societies must make a change in order to reverse some of the
environmental effects brought on by current social norms.
For example, in societies like China, the government has put policies in place that regulate the
number of children allowed to a couple. Other societies have already begun to implement social
marketing strategies in order to educate the public on overpopulation effects. "The intervention
can be widespread and done at a low cost. A variety of print materials (flyers, brochures, fact
sheets, stickers) needs to be produced and distributed throughout the communities such as at local
places of worship, sporting events, local food markets, schools and at car parks (taxis / bus stands).
Such prompts work to introduce the problem so that social norms are easier to implement. Certain
government policies are making it easier and more socially acceptable to use contraception and
abortion methods. An example of a country whose laws and norms are hindering the global effort
to slow population growth is Afghanistan. "The approval by Afghan President Hamid Karzai of
the Shia Personal Status Law in March 2009 effectively destroyed Shia women's rights and
freedoms in Afghanistan. Under this law, women have no right to deny their husbands sex unless
they are ill, and can be denied food if they do.
Deforestation:
Deforestation is clearance or clearing is the removal of a forest or stand of trees where the land is
thereafter converted to a non-forest use. Examples of deforestation include conversion of
forestland to farms, ranches, or urban use. The most concentrated deforestation occurs in tropical
rainforests.
When forest cover is removed, wildlife is deprived of habitat and becomes more vulnerable to
hunting. Considering that about 80% of the world's documented species can be found in tropical
rainforests, deforestation poses a serious threat to the Earth's biodiversity.
Deforestation occurs for multiple reasons: trees are cut down to be used for building or sold as
fuel, (sometimes in the form of charcoal or timber), while cleared land is used as pasture for
livestock and plantation. The removal of trees without sufficient reforestation has resulted in
damage to habitat, biodiversity loss and aridity. It has adverse impacts on bio sequestration of
atmospheric carbon dioxide. Deforestation has also been used in war to deprive the enemy of cover
for its forces and also vital resources. Modern examples of this were the use of Agent Orange by
the British military in Malaya during the Malayan Emergency and the United States military in
Vietnam during the Vietnam War. As of 2005, net deforestation rates have ceased to increase in
countries with a per capita GDP of at least US$4,600. Deforested regions typically incur
significant adverse soil erosion and frequently degrade into wasteland.

Disregard of ascribed value, lax forest management and deficient environmental laws are some of
the factors that allow deforestation to occur on a large scale. In many countries, deforestation, both
naturally occurring and human-induced, is an ongoing issue. Deforestation causes extinction,
changes to climatic conditions, desertification, and displacement of populations as observed by
current conditions and in the past through the fossil record. More than half of all plant and land
animal species in the world live in tropical forests.
Causes:
according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
secretariat, the overwhelming direct cause of deforestation is agriculture. Subsistence farming is
responsible for 48% of deforestation; commercial agriculture is responsible for 32%; logging is
responsible for 14%, and fuel wood removals make up 5%.

Experts do not agree on whether industrial logging is an important contributor to global

deforestation. Some argue that poor people are more likely to clear forest because they have no
alternatives, others that the poor lack the ability to pay for the materials and labor needed to clear
forest. One study found that population increases due to high fertility rates were a primary driver
of tropical deforestation in only 8% of cases.
Other causes of contemporary deforestation may include corruption of government
institutions, the inequitable distribution of wealth and power, population
growth and overpopulation, and urbanization. Globalization is often viewed as another root cause
of deforestation, though there are cases in which the impacts of globalization (new flows of labor,
capital, commodities, and ideas) have promoted localized forest recovery.

The last batch of sawn wood from the peat forest in Indragiri Hulu, Sumatra, Indonesia.
Deforestation for oil palm plantation.

In 2000 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that "the role of
population dynamics in a local setting may vary from decisive to negligible," and that deforestation
can result from "a combination of population pressure and stagnating economic, social and
technological conditions."
The degradation of forest ecosystems has also been traced to economic incentives that make forest
conversion appear more profitable than forest conservation. Many important forest functions have
no markets, and hence, no economic value that is readily apparent to the forests' owners or the
communities that rely on forests for their well-being. From the perspective of the developing
world, the benefits of forest as carbon sinks or biodiversity reserves go primarily to richer
developed nations and there is insufficient compensation for these services. Developing countries
feel that some countries in the developed world, such as the United States of America, cut down
their forests centuries ago and benefited economically from this deforestation, and that it is
hypocritical to deny developing countries the same opportunities, i.e. that the poor shouldn't have
to bear the cost of preservation when the rich created the problem.
Some commentators have noted a shift in the drivers of deforestation over the past 30
years. Whereas deforestation was primarily driven by subsistence activities and government-
sponsored development projects like transmigration in countries
like Indonesia and colonization in Latin America, India, Java, and so on, during the late 19th
century and the earlier half of the 20th century, by the 1990s the majority of deforestation was
caused by industrial factors, including extractive industries, large-scale cattle ranching, and
extensive agriculture
Solutions:
Monitoring deforestation
Here are multiple methods that are appropriate and reliable for reducing and monitoring
deforestation. One method is the “visual interpretation of aerial photos or satellite imagery that is
labor-intensive but does not require high-level training in computer image processing or extensive
computational resources”. Another method includes hot-spot analysis (that is, locations of rapid
change) using expert opinion or coarse resolution satellite data to identify locations for detailed
digital analysis with high resolution satellite images. Deforestation is typically assessed by
quantifying the amount of area deforested, measured at the present time. From an environmental
point of view, quantifying the damage and its possible consequences is a more important task,
while conservation efforts are more focused on forested land protection and development of land-
use alternatives to avoid continued deforestation. Deforestation rate and total area deforested, have
been widely used for monitoring deforestation in many regions, including the Brazilian Amazon
deforestation monitoring by INPE. A global satellite view is available.

Forest management
Efforts to stop or slow deforestation have been attempted for many centuries because it has long
been known that deforestation can cause environmental damage sufficient in some cases to cause
societies to collapse. In Tonga, paramount rulers developed policies designed to prevent conflicts
between short-term gains from converting forest to farmland and long-term problems forest loss
would cause, while during the 17th and 18th centuries in Tokugawa, Japan, the shoguns developed
a highly sophisticated system of long-term planning to stop and even reverse deforestation of the
preceding centuries through substituting timber by other products and more efficient use of land
that had been farmed for many centuries. In 16th-century Germany, landowners also
developed sylvicultural to deal with the problem of deforestation. However, these policies tend to
be limited to environments with good rainfall, no dry season and very
young soils (through volcanism or glaciation). This is because on older and less fertile soils trees
grow too slowly for sylvicultural to be economic, whilst in areas with a strong dry season there is
always a risk of forest fires destroying a tree crop before it matures.
In the areas where "slash-and-burn" is practiced, switching to "slash-and-char" would prevent the
rapid deforestation and subsequent degradation of soils. The biochar thus created, given back to
the soil, is not only a durable carbon sequestration method, but it also is an extremely
beneficial amendment to the soil. Mixed with biomass it brings the creation of terra pretax, one of
the richest soils on the planet and the only one known to regenerate itself.
Nuclear issues:
the nuclear power debate is a controversy about the deployment and use of nuclear fission
reactors to generate electricity from nuclear fuel for civilian purposes. The debate about nuclear
power peaked during the 1970s and 1980s, when it "reached an intensity unprecedented in the
history of technology controversies" in some countries. Observers attribute the nuclear controversy
to the impossibility of generating a shared perception between social actors over the use of this
technology as well as systemic mismatches between expectations and experience.

Causes:
The world's nuclear fleet creates about 10,000 metric tons of high-level spent nuclear fuel each
year. High-level radioactive waste management concerns management and disposal of
highly radioactive materials created during production of nuclear power. The technical issues in
accomplishing this are daunting, due to the extremely long periods radioactive wastes remain
deadly to living organisms. Of particular concern are two long-lived fission products, technetium-
99 (half-life 220,000 years) and iodine-129 (half-life 15.7 million years),[100] which dominate
spent nuclear fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years. The most troublesome transuranic
elements in spent fuel are neptunium-237 (half-life two million years) and plutonium-239 (half-
life 24,000 years).[ Consequently, high-level radioactive waste requires sophisticated treatment
and management to successfully isolate it from the biosphere. This usually necessitates treatment,
followed by a long-term management strategy involving permanent storage, disposal or
transformation of the waste into a non-toxic form.

Solutions:
The nuclear power industry has improved the safety and performance of reactors, and has proposed
new safer (but generally untested) reactor designs but there is no guarantee that the reactors will
be designed, built and operated correctly.[128] Mistakes do occur and the designers of reactors
at Fukushima in Japan did not anticipate that a tsunami generated by an earthquake would disable
the backup systems that were supposed to stabilize the reactor after the earthquake. According
to UBS AG, the Fukushima I nuclear accidents have cast doubt on whether even an advanced
economy like Japan can master nuclear safety.

Global warming:
Global Warming is the increase of Earth's average surface temperature due to effect of greenhouse
gases, such as carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels or from deforestation, which
trap heat that would otherwise escape from Earth.

Global warming and climate change are terms for the observed century-scale rise in the average
temperature of the Earth's climate system and its related effects. Multiple lines of scientific
evidence show that the climate system is warming. Many of the observed changes since the 1950s
are unprecedented over tens to thousands of years.
In 2014 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment
Report concluded that "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of
the observed warming since the mid-20th century." The largest human influence has been
emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide; human activities
have led to carbon dioxide concentrations above levels not seen in hundreds of thousands of
years. Climate model projections summarized in the report indicated that during the 21st century
the global surface temperature is likely to rise a further 0.3 to 1.7 °C (0.5 to 3.1 °F) for their
lowest emissions scenario and 2.6 to 4.8 °C (4.7 to 8.6 °F) for the highest emissions
scenario.[8] These findings have been recognized by the national science academies of the major
industrialized nations and are not disputed by any scientific body of national or international
standing.
Causes:
Most climate scientists agree the main cause of the current global warming trend is human
expansion of the "greenhouse effect" that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from
Earth toward space. Certain gases in the atmosphere block heat from escaping.
Global warming is primarily a problem of too much carbon dioxide (CO2) in the
atmosphere—which acts as a blanket, trapping heat and warming the planet. As we burn
fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas for energy or cut down and burn forests to create
pastures and plantations, carbon accumulates and overloads our atmosphere. Certain waste
management and agricultural practices aggravate the problem by releasing other potent
global warming gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide. See the pie chart for a breakdown
of heat-trapping global warming emissions by economic sector.

Solutions:
1. Reduce Fossil Fuel Use. Burning fossil fuels increases the levels of greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere. ...
2. Plant Trees. Because carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas, planting trees
and other plants can slow or stop global warming. ...
3. Reduce Waste. ...
4. Conserve Water.
5. Reduce lawn size. ...
6. Recycle whenever possible. ...
7. Eat locally produced food. ...
8. Eat vegetarian meals. ...
9. Paint your home a light color if you live in a warm climate, or a dark color in a cold
climate.
10. Choose clean energy options. ...
11. Buy clean energy certificates and carbon offsets.