environmental science essay

environmental science essay

The Importance of Environmental Science in Addressing Global Challenges

1. Introduction to Environmental Science

As a result, increased specialization, particularly in developed nations, has produced many environmental issues which today occur at an unprecedented rate and scale. With increasing regularity, environmental issues force societies to make public policy decisions within the broad confines of the economic, social, and political influences and constraints. Such policy decisions involve unresolved philosophic, ethical, and value conflicts, many of which transcend the narrow issues involved.

As societies have developed, it has become increasingly more difficult to use the traditional problem-solving approach to address environmental problems. While it is true that we face some new environmental problems today, such as the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer or the disposal of waste, although such problems have occurred before, they seem to be more difficult to resolve. What makes today’s environmental issues different for society is that they are significantly more complex, often having long-term, even global, and potentially irreversible impacts.

Even though relatively small numbers of environmental scientists are actively involved, people have been attempting to deal with the issues surrounding environmental protection, degradation, and restoration for thousands of years. Often, such efforts have been influenced by economic or social motivations, and usually followed a crisis or as a result of serious use and abuse of land, resources, and other problems.

Environmental science is the academic field that systematically studies the development and utilization of land, water, mineral, energy, and wildlife resources. It involves monitoring and developing social, economic, and political awareness of how to maintain a safe and stable life support system for people. This field straddles many disciplines, which permits the environmental scientist to approach related problems from a holistic point of view.

2. Key Concepts and Theories in Environmental Science

Fresh water is essential to life on Earth, but both the distribution and availability of fresh water vary widely across the planet. 97% of Earth’s water resources reside in the oceans as salt water. Most of the remainder is frozen in the polar ice caps, and only a small fraction is fresh water available for human consumption as surface water or groundwater. Each year, the American people withdraw about 170 billion gallons of fresh water from our rivers, lakes, and underground sources, and we use three-fourths of that amount for purposes such as thermoelectric power, human consumption, and industrial consumption.

The hydrologic cycle is the movement of water in various reservoirs on Earth’s surface and atmosphere, which we call the Earth system. Water is transferred from reservoir to reservoir, and it is continually recycled in the system. The sun drives the hydrologic cycle. Solar energy causes water to evaporate from the ocean and other Earth surfaces. When this water vaporizes, it gains energy, rises into the atmosphere, and forms clouds. Once the droplets of the cloud mass collide and coalesce to a sufficient size, they become heavy enough to fall out of the cloud as precipitation. The most familiar types of precipitation only occur when air temperatures near the Earth’s surface are sufficiently low. If the Earth were warmer, no snow would fall, and much less of the precipitation would freeze as it does at colder temperatures. The concern of environmental science is that human activities are altering the hydrologic cycle and causing considerable environmental problems.

3. Applications of Environmental Science in Addressing Climate Change

These are sitting on a foundation of a climate change symptom’s entropy production: CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, resulting in highly entropic degradation products. At least for the next 12-13 years, the global community finds itself in the position of needing to make instrumental changes to reduce such emissions incrementally, or increasingly contend with the ever-decreasing probability of optimal avoiding of the wide variability in potential disasters of 2.0°C vs higher temperature mean global warming. Such consequences might greatly exceed those already observed, as the additional impacts range from negative asset valuation shifts through various kinds of replenishment, maintenance, and rehabilitation expenses (some in effect of the national budgets and, through time, accumulated capital stock) to highly undesirable nonmonetary losses. Also, proportioned to increases in harmful climate-related variables’ averages and variabilities.

One of the most significant challenges facing humanity is climate change. With a large suite of direct and indirect environmental consequences, from sea-level rise and glacial melt to extreme weather events, drought, and changes to land cover, are exacerbated as the Earth’s average surface temperature increases. Environmental scientists are studying energy use and its many contributions to atmosphere-altering emissions and developing or advising on numerous possible solutions, from alternative energy technologies and appropriate land use planning to policies that encourage widespread changes. Regardless of the role played by the scientists themselves, good quality environmental science education can also aid communication within and act as a foundation to understand the serious concerns facing society.

4. Challenges and Opportunities in Environmental Science Research

The challenges underscore the need to examine the key environmental science research that different nations, including the U.S., need to focus on in order to move the field forward for the benefit of future generations. Essentially, to enable environmental scientists and other stakeholders to collaboratively wrestle with issues of mutual interest, two broad but exciting priority areas should be entertained. They include significantly more integrative research among the environmental sub-disciplines communities to establish improved frameworks for the hard questions posed, and a sharp focus on translational research that seamlessly integrates environmental science research with creating solutions to problems perceived from the environmental sciences themselves.

A judicious review of the myriad environmental challenges facing society suggests that the challenges obviously are of a multifaceted nature, providing opportunities for novel cutting-edge collaborative research. Environmental science enjoys the added advantage of its holistic perspective on human-environmental interactions. Over the past decade or two, more and more experts have been engaged in the production of interdisciplinary research in an attempt to better focus on emerging issues and new science for addressing them. While energy, water, and environmental pollution dominate the list of these challenges, many others readily come to mind, including land pressure, vulnerability to natural disasters, and the effects of global climate change on food, water, and human security.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

Changing environmental problems also present an ongoing challenge for the educators and the students of tomorrow. As we develop new knowledge about the natural world, new human activities and technologies will invariably arise. Some of these will directly produce new opportunities for creativity and economic advancement. In turn, however, these developments will also create new stresses on the environment or represent new opportunities to adjust, replacing obsolete, polluting activities with cleaner, more efficient counterparts. Successful universities and colleges teaching environmental science must recognize and nurture the interrelationships between their teaching programs, cooperative research activities, and the need for innovation in guiding societal transitions with respect to alternative land, water, and air uses. In sum, teaching environmental science and training students of the future offer great opportunities to engage productively in addressing the joint disturbances caused by human activities across Earth’s extended body. We hope that environmental science programs can contribute in increasingly bold and innovative ways to stimulating relevant curricular advances broadly across the undergraduate teaching enterprise.

In conclusion, it is important to emphasize that training environmental science students in the knowledge and skills necessary to address the global challenges in land, water, and air pollution depends critically on the implications that these global challenges have on society. In depicting changes in the nature of the global pollution issue, we have tried to illustrate how increased interconnectivity and understanding of the scale or magnitude of our collective impacts on the environment have increased the importance and urgency of confronting these challenges as a society. Increasing this societal understanding of the magnitude of these challenges is an essential element for the success of environmental programs. Fostering graduates who can combine scientific understanding with practical judgment and an enhanced sense of public responsibility is a particular strength of scholarship in environmental science and is a cornerstone of educational programs in this burgeoning field.