Throughout the century, humans have played a huge role in the impact of climate change that is affecting the earth and its inhabitants. With the industrial revolution, huge amounts of CO2 being released into the air, and changing the landscape of the earth to fit our needs such as deforestation, is harming the earth in numerous ways and is only getting worse every year. Changes in climate are affecting not only humans but also animals, agriculture, populated cities, and the lower class. By exploring the far-reaching consequences that climate change could bring, we can analyze how bad climate change is affecting our agriculture, animals and our economy.
Agriculture is the cornerstone of human civilization and is necessary for survival of all humans of all classes. Within the earth, there are regions that are abundant with fertile soil, and there are regions that cannot produce any type of mass quantities of agriculture at all. Regions supporting agriculture has a huge demand for farmers to grow an abundance of food for a dense population. With climate change, changes in weather patterns could be detrimental for the food being grown within their respective countries of origin. If the weather in an agricultural abundant region is to change in a way that doesn’t support growing crops, then the amount of food surplus will decrease. A warming planet and the increasing heat waves of climate change can also impact the amount of fresh water which in many areas have been decreasing which could also affect agriculture. This can cause a the number of farmers to decrease, leaving more people within that region to starve or move to other countries decreasing the amount of people in the workforce and lowering a nation’s GDP. Climate change also affects shipping and handling. It affects shipping and handling because of rapid weather changes can cause damage to cargo ships and delay shipping dates. In the article, “Agricultural workers face several climate-related health risks. These include exposures to heat and other extreme weather, more pesticide exposure due to expanded pest presence, disease-carrying pests like mosquitos and ticks, and degraded air quality.23 Language barriers, lack of health care access, and other factors can compound these risks.24 Heat and humidity can also affect the health and productivity of animals raised for meat, milk, and eggs.25” (Climate Change Impacts on Agriculture and Food Supply | US EPA).To further reinforce this, farmers would have to find ways to adapt to this new challenge that could either make or break their business as a whole.
Another factor that is being affected by climate change is the effect it has on the world economy. According to the article, “the Travel & Tourism sector contributed 7.6% to global GDP; an increase of 22% from 2021 and only 23% below 2019 levels.”Travel & Tourism Economic Impact | World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). Tourism is a key factor to many nations’ economies and the negative impacts of climate change can reduce the amount of tourism in places that are normally viable for a vacation or a place to travel, for instance the desert in Nevada would be uninhabitable due to high humidity and rising temperatures.
With increasing deforestation more carbon stored by trees is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide which leads to a rising global temperature that can ultimately cause more heatwaves, forest fires, and effect both the environment in which inhabitants live. Forest fires and deforestation forces animals to leave their natural habitat and migrate to human-populated cities, or become invasive to other environments causing an imbalance in the food chain. People in densely populated cities can also be affected by the amounts of people moving into these cities because of inefficient cooling and constant travel distance in the heat and can experience massive heat waves due to how dense the population can be. This can cause major health defects and effect the lower classes the most as they do not have the economic power to stay stable in a rising heated environment. Those who are poor would have to pay for extra utilities like cooling and an inflated hospital costs. Food would also be more costly due to food scarcity effecting the poor even more. According to the article, “With electricity unavailable or too expensive for 600-million people in Africa, vast areas of forest are being denuded for fuelwood or charcoal to cook and to warm homes by those who have no other fuel. Faced with buying logs from a plantation or cutting them for free in the wild, people who don’t have enough money for food choose the latter. With deforestation, the land degrades and soon enough there’s a desert where the jungle once stood.”Climate Change Hurts The Poor: But Not The Way You Think It Does (forbes.com)
Although climate change can be the worst for most parts of the world, some parts of the world may benefit from climate change. The countries that can benefit from climate change are countries that reside in the northern hemisphere and colder regions. With heat and humidity infertile lands would be able to be farmed since the weather is more suitable there it was before, and tourism will start to increase since colder countries won’t be so cold anymore.
All in all, climate change is detrimental to the earth and its inhabitants, affecting the environment, animals, economy, and agriculture. Its consequences can lead to a decrease in food, migrating animals, and impact our economy that would make the world unrecognizable. Governments and citizens need to take action to fight climate change so that our future generations can prosper on the earth just as we and thousands of generations before us did. We can have a sustainable future.
image: https://adigaskell.org/2019/05/30/how-serious-games-are-helping-farmers-adapt-to-climate-change/
