Essay On Earth Boundaries

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We have been living in the Holocene; a relatively warm, stable period that started at the end of the last ice age some 11700 years ago and still continues today. As the climate became warmer after the Pleistocene Ice Age agriculture was invented and the global population started to increase. Today there are more 7 billion people alive. The increasing population is putting a lot of pressure of our planet, with industrialization still rapidly increasing our skies and waters are becoming more and more polluted and the natural resources becoming exhausted. Planetary boundaries have been identified and if these are crossed the earth will move out of this stable Holocene period, and into what is known as the Anthropocene.
Still today inequality of income and power means that almost 870 million people are chronically undernourished, and more than a billion people live below the poverty line. If current growth trends continue the planetary boundaries will be reached and this will cause rapid environmental change. This will be devastating for people living in poverty who depend upon natural resources as a livelihood. It is possible to change the current trends so that every person has a social foundation and live within the planetary boundaries. I will discuss what the Anthropocene is and what ecological and environmental effects it has. I will show you how through sustainable development we can both eradicate poverty and do this within our planet’s boundaries.
The Anthropocene
The term is defined as the start of a new geological time period where human activity has been the significant influence on the changes in climate and the environment. The effects of human acidity can be felt today, increased carbon dioxide levels has led to a r...

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...structure caused is a result of the increased global temperature. This shows the importance of well-established social foundation policies.
Planetary boundaries
As human activity drives the planet into a new epoch, the Anthropocene, further stresses on the earth will unbalance the fundamental biophysical systems which will cause very rapid, unpredictable environmental changes. In 2009 29 top earth-system scientists came together at the Stockholm Environment Institute and created a new concept: planetary boundaries. These nine earth-systems are natural cycles that don’t seem to directly affect us but each process is fundamental in human survival.
Johan Rockström (director of the Stockholm Environment Institute) and his colleagues analysed how far we’d already pushed each earth-system process and how much further we could go until causing irreversible and rapid enviro

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