Preventing the Desertification of the Aral Sea Region Essay

Individuals are part of the ecosystem: We are tightly interwoven into the total ecosystem of the world.

The relationship between humans and their environment is a topic that engenders much debate. Humans are intellectual. They can think, reason, feel and make deductions or hypothesis and seek to solve or prove their deductions or theories. The environment on the other hand is inanimate and exists by means of natural laws and principles that govern the universe. It cannot prevent man’s exploitations; it cannot take up arms and fight. However, in its own way, by natural laws, it makes efforts to purge and renew itself from the effects of man’s endeavors. Mangor (2002) argues that like the ocean that

Ecosystems can be restored by retaining and restoring the ecological sustainability of watersheds, forests, and rangelands for present and future generations.

“Biological diversity is of fundamental importance to the functioning of all natural and human-engineered ecosystems, and by extension to the ecosystem services that nature provides free of charge to human society ”(Lloyd, 2014). Biodiversity is very important to both plants, animals and humans on Earth and if one species is destroyed it throw the balance off .

This money is being used to build a second dam, after the successful $68 million dam that split the sea into two and already filling the northern sea up. Although this has seen fishermen’s business improve along with returning rain, the problem on the Uzbekistan border is yet to be solved with the southern sea still shrinking. The economy of Uzbekistan is struggling to fix this problem as their economy heavily depends of cash crops which are not being produced due to the lack of water and irrigation of cotton fields. An additional problem for Uzbekistan is that their headwaters are controlled by other countries. This problem is exacerbated by the part of the world they’re in and any change could easily trigger conflict from neighbouring countries. To conclude, although large water management schemes due in some cases increase water security for the intended target destination, there are many other factors which need to be considered deeply to evaluate whether the economic costs as well as the environmental and social costs are worth sacrificing for what the project will

The environment is the home to all living and non-living organisms. It can be compared to a life support system that ensures the well-being of everyone. Recent cases of environmental degradation pose a threat to nature and the entire ecosystem. There has been increased awareness to educate individuals on the need to protect our environment with the aim of protecting the natural beauty and sustaining humanity.

At the very beginning of the report, “the functioning of natural ecosystems and the health of the human economy have been intrinsically linked”

Ecosystem services are defined as the direct and indirect benefits to human well being that are derived from ecosystems and ecosystem function (Gomez-Baggethun and Barton 2013, TEEB 2011), or in other words, “the conditions and processes through which natural ecosystems, and the species that make them up, sustain and fulfill human life” (Daily, 1997, p. 3). The ecosystem service framework may be used to assess present day function, monitor change over time, and inform future planning, conservation, and restoration to maximize the ecosystem function and services generated at multiple scales (Daily et al. 2009; Sukhdev et al. 2010).

The environment is the domiciliary created as a gift by mother nature, to give us a place to work, grow, play, and live. However these days, our beloved environment is being polluted, rigorously. We humans and other living creatures depend upon the environment and our natural surroundings. It gives us all the essentials for survival, such as oxygen/fresh air, food, shelter, and water. It is always there for us, whether we need a peaceful, serene escape from our fast-paced cities, or when we’re feeling a little adventurous, and just need a chance to explore. The environment has made beauty accessible to us, right out our front door. Mountains, caves, beautiful landscapes, and idiosyncratic animal species, are all “Yours to Discover.” Yet,

6) Describe at least three ways in which ecosystem services support human societies. For each one, discuss the measures an/ or technologies that would need to be taken or developed to replace these services if they were no longer provided to us by natural systems. Are there some ecosystem services that cannot be replaced at any cost?

Six million hectares of primary forest have been lost annually since 2000, and average hard coral cover in the Caribbean has decreased from 50% to 10%. Both of these changes occurred in a short period of time, and humans have been the primary cause. Human impact on biodiversity and the environment is very significant. Research has defined humans uses of renewable and nonrenewable resources, their positive and negative impacts on ecosystems, and our solutions and ideas for maintaining biodiversity.

Ecological integrity is the ability to support and maintain a balanced, integrated, adaptive community of organisms having a species composition, diversity, and functional organization comparable to that of the natural habitat of the region. However, a consensus has not yet emerged as to the definition of ecological integrity. Clearly, human activities result in many environmental changes that enhance some species, ecosystems, and ecological processes, while at the same time causing important damage to others. The challenge for the concept of ecological integrity is to provide a means of distinguishing between responses that represent improvements in the quality of ecosystems, and those that are degradations. Nature

It has also led to an economic disaster as the main industries of the region have all collapsed. Changes in salt content of the Aral Sea and loss of the biota have led to complete crash of fishery and processing industries and that resulted in unemployment of 60,000 people connected with sea jobs. In 1996 only 547 tons of fish were caught in the destroyed deltas of the Syrdarya and Amudarya rivers and 100 tons of this amount were plaices. A high content of poisonous pesticides is found in those fish that are caught.

A photograph of Earth reveals a great deal, but it does not convey the complexity of our environment. Our environment (a term that comes from the French environner, “to surround”) is more than water, land, and air; it is the sum total of our surroundings. It includes all of the biotic factors, or living things, with which we interact. It also includes the abiotic factors, or nonliving things, with which we interact. Our environment includes the continents, oceans, clouds, and ice caps you can see in the photo of Earth from space, as well as the animals, plants, forests, and farms that comprise the landscapes around us. In a more inclusive sense, it also encompasses our built

Earth, a massive rock with a copious amount of minerals and elements, consist of many natural features that benefit our structure of life. The Earth has limited resources because it is a closed system, meaning it must operate under the standard conditions in which it was given to us and many generations to come. The ecosystem consists of biotic and abiotic interactions that work together to provide us with many natural resources. New resources cannot be created but only withdrawn from the ecosystems that occupy it. Barry Commoner, a biologist and leading ecologist, ruled four major laws of ecology, first that everything is connected to something else in some way. Second, everything must go somewhere. Third, nature knows best. Lastly,