We have a critical window of opportunity between now and to put in place commitments and actions to reverse the trend of nature loss by and help ensure the health and well-being of people and our planet. Every day new evidence of our unsustainable impact on the environment is emerging. This has happened in less than a generation. A blink of the eye, compared to the hundreds of millions of years some of these species have lived on our planet.
All indicators point toward our planet being on the brink. Why does this matter? It matters because we will not build a stable, prosperous and equitable future on a depleted planet. It is time to focus on the solutions which we know exist or have the potential to be developed and this is where technology, along with behavioural change, can help us reboot the health of our nature and planet.
Earlier this year, WWF in Australia, Fiji and New Zealand joined forces to stamp out illegal fishing and slave labour in the tuna fishing industry using blockchain technology. On land as well, remote sensing plays an important role in planning, monitoring, and evaluating impact on the ground. It has enabled WWF to monitor the developments of extractive industries in socially and ecologically-sensitive areas, including World Heritage sites.
WRI World Research Institute has developed Global Forest Watch GFW , an online forest monitoring and alert system that uses crowdsourcing, to allow anyone to create custom maps, analyse forest trends, subscribe to alerts, or download data for their local area or the entire world.
They search for armed poachers who spill across the border from Tanzania to hunt for bush meat and ivory. For years the number of poachers overwhelmed the relatively small cadre of rangers. Technology is now helping to turn the tide. Thermal imaging video cameras enable rangers to catch poachers at record rates and deter many more from even making the attempt. Beyond direct interventions to stop poaching, WWF also uses technology to go after wildlife traffickers. It is hard to think of technology and nature together but even advances like Artificial Intelligence AI that could not be further removed from the natural world are helping conservation efforts.
In China, WWF and tech giant Intel are harnessing the power of AI to help protect wild tigers and their habitats, while also protecting countless other species as a result while helping carbon storage, vital watersheds and communities in the area. The possibilities for technology partnerships to reboot nature are endless. Our challenge now is to scale this work beyond a few test sites and into all of the places we are working to protect the planet.
More than technology, we need a fundamental shift in mindset and understanding of the role that nature and biodiversity plans in our lives and businesses. If we continue to produce, consume and power our lives the way we do right now, forests, oceans and weather systems will be overwhelmed and collapse.
Unsustainable agriculture, fisheries, infrastructure projects, mining and energy are leading to unprecedented biodiversity loss and habitat degradation, over-exploitation, pollution and climate change. If fuel cells become widely adopted in transportation, emissions will plunge there too.
Adopting such technologies may not be a perfect solution, however, particularly in power generation. Some fuel cell technologies release carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. In addition, small-scale plants serving only residential areas or small businesses may be less able to balance the peaks in demand than are larger plants serving both types of customers. Air quality and climate change are the dominant, but not the only, environmental issues relating to energy use and production.
Industrial and vehicular emissions, particularly of nitrogen oxides, are also detrimental to water quality. Nitrogen deposition acts as a fertilizer and promote the growth of algae in lakes, rivers, and estuaries, creating eutrophic conditions that kill submerged aquatic vegetation.
In some places, such as the Chesapeake Bay, eutrophication threatens commercial fishing as well as recreational pursuits. Even more serious is the agricultural runoff of pesticides, fertilizer, and animal waste. In the past few years, however, the tools of geographic information systems GIS using remotely sensed data have offered new ways to identify and observe these sources. The techniques combine land-use information with hydrology, topography, and soil data to make detailed, digitized maps at very fine scales and measure the potential for runoff.
Remote sensing data on actual farming activities, collected by aircraft and satellites, can be combined with the digital maps to provide more accurate and timely monitoring and estimation of runoff. While it may not be possible to trace all the runoff to its original source, it is increasingly possible and cost-effective to trace much of it. GIS tools have also fostered precision farm practices using real-time, computerized, and detailed information about crop health.
Remote sensors on harvesting equipment enable growers to discriminate among rows of crops for irrigating and for applying pesticides and fertilizer, thus increasing crop yields and reducing chemical use. And precision agriculture may have a bright future: information technology sales in the farm sector are now comparable to sales of farm equipment. Remote sensing technology has also begun to improve the efficiency of municipal water use.
Even in the United States, water is priced in a way that encourages wasteful consumption. The problem is compounded in many other countries, particularly in the developing world, because of a lack of infrastructure to meter water use. In Buenos Aires, for example, customers pay for water based on the size of their houses or apartments.
The city has recently updated its real estate maps using remotely sensed data. Some hotels had been masquerading as studio apartments and were billed accordingly. While remote sensing has not replaced the need for metering, the new data have at least allowed the city to price water more accurately. The technologies raise some privacy concerns, for instance, that could lead polluters to cloak or hide their polluting activities, further inhibiting pollution monitoring and cleanup.
Several legal cases concerning constitutional protections against warrantless searches have been motivated by the use of aerial photography for monitoring environmental compliance, and in more recent cases polluters had attempted to shield their actions from surveillance. Most recently, Midwest farming conglomerates have expressed concern about the public availability of aerial imagery if it is detailed enough to disclose farming practices.
Such concerns could lead to curbs on the use of remote sensing for pollution monitoring and regulatory enforcement. The trade-off between benefits and costs of new developments in biotechnology has made headlines in the case of genetically modified food supplies. Similar concerns surround the technology of bioremediation. Naturally occurring microorganisms have long been used to break down human, agricultural, industrial, and municipal organic wastes. Now, genetically engineered organisms are being used to treat not only industrial effluent, but also wastewater, contaminated soil, and petroleum spills.
Bioremediation treats about percent of all toxic chemicals and other hazardous waste; has successfully treated oil, gasoline, toluene, naphthalene, pentachlorophenol a fungicide and wood preservative , and agricultural waste; and is being used at more than 30 munitions test areas across the United States.
Bioremediation can be a particularly cost-effective approach. Most of the costs of traditional cleanup technologies come in removing and disposing of contaminated soil, water, or other materials. Sustained technological advancement is essential for the development of our species.
And, as history has shown us, technology can have profound implications for our future. When we think about technology, the first thing that leaps to mind may be the devices that most of us carry with us and use every single day. Smartphones, tablets, and laptops have revolutionized the way we live — and many would argue, have brought us numerous benefits.
But there is no denying that these everyday technologies have come at a cost to the environment. These, and other modern electronic devices all present concerns when it comes to resource use, energy use, carbon footprint, and waste. When we look at the entire life cycle of our technological devices, it is easy to see why these electronic marvels are also a huge problem for our environment. When analyzing the environmental cost of technology, it is important to consider what materials went into making them in the first place, and where those materials came from.
A huge number of finite natural resources and precious metals go into making our electronic devices and other modern technology. The picture is a complex one, and the ingredients required to make just one phone come from all over the world. This can make the end-to-end analysis difficult.
However, when you begin to delve into where the different elements come from — the environmental toll and human costs truly begin to mount up. Mining itself, of course, comes with a high carbon cost. Huge machinery, usually powered by fossil fuels, is usually involved and the processes involved often use a lot of water and are hugely polluting.
Mining is responsible for deforestation, landscape degradation, and water pollution, as well as the release of vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the air 2. Examples of environmental problems with the sourcing of minerals and precious metals for technological devices and electronic equipment are everywhere you look. Consider the issues with cobalt mines in the Congo, to lithium despoiling the Chilean desert, and to lakes of toxic sludge in Inner Mongolia. Evidence shows how our desires for technology and the need for rare earth minerals affect the environment.
And these three examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The more you delve into the origins of the minerals and other materials required to make our everyday technologies — the more worrying and bleak the picture becomes. On average, around 35 different materials are used in smartphones. This is just one example of everyday technology.
When you begin to think about where all these different materials have come from, you begin to see the scale of the problems. Plastic is, after silicon, the second most-used material. And as you are no doubt aware, plastic is derived from fossil fuels.
Production requires high-emission techniques and poses a range of serious threats to our environment. Iron, aluminum, copper, lead, zinc, tin, nickel, and barium are the next most important materials in terms of the percentage of the finished product. All these things have to be mined. As we have seen from the above, mining can carry huge environmental and human costs.
The environmental impact of technology does not end with the raw materials and where they have come from. Manufacturers require massive energy to turn them into the complex electronic, technological products we use. Transportation of these products around the world also comes with a high carbon cost. Of course, huge servers and data banks that enable these technologies to work also use vast quantities of energy each year. And much of that does not come from renewable energy sources.
Efficiency is increasing, and the use of renewable energy is very much on the rise, but we still have a long way to go. It is also worth remembering that every time we plug in an electronic device to a non-renewable source, then our use of that device comes with a carbon cost. This contributes to greenhouse gases and our climate crisis. Related: How to Reduce your Carbon Footprint. The environmental costs of consumer technology do not end there.
These products also pose a problem at the end of their useful lives. A small proportion of old electronic devices are recycled. However, the vast majority ends up in landfill sites or burned in dumps. These dumps are usually located out of sight, around some of the planet's poorest and most vulnerable people.
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