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Our generation's big challenge: environmental change

Our environment is changing: as humans increase our ability to control and manipulate natural resources, our impact on the world increases with it. Biodiversity - the variety of life held on Earth - is a fundamental part of our planet's life support system and it supports many basic natural services for humans, such as fresh water, fertile soil and clean air. Biodiversity helps pollinate our flowers and crops, clean up our waste and put food on the table, it plays a role in regulating natural processes such as the growth cycles of plants, the mating seasons of animals, and even weather systems: without it we would not be able to survive.

We are facing a huge environmental change, which differs from previous changes in that it is not caused by external environmental events. The cause is the use by human beings of around 25-50% of all plant-produced energy resources generated by our planet, as well as over-consumption of other natural resources such as fossil fuels, mineral deposits and water.
Habitat loss and fragmentation is considered by conservation biologists to be the cause of biodiversity loss. Clearance of native vegetation for agriculture, housing, timber and industry, as well as draining wetlands and flooding valleys to form reservoirs, destroys these habitats and all the life in them. This destruction can cause remaining habitats to become fragmented, too small for many organisms to survive or too far apart for them to flow between.
Pollution is poisoning all forms of life, both on land and in the water, and contributing to climate change. Any chemical in the wrong place or at the wrong concentration can be considered a pollutant. Transport, industry, construction, natural resource extraction and power generation all create pollutants. These chemicals directly affect animals and plants, and lead to chemical imbalances in the environment that ultimately kill individuals, species and habitats.
Climate change, brought about by emissions of greenhouse gases when fossil fuels are burnt, is changing the environment in which species live and in turn affecting the abundance and distribution of species around the globe. Climate change will affect the crops we grow in the future, cause a rise in sea levels and problems to many coastal ecosystems. The climate is becoming more unpredictable and extreme devastating events are becoming more frequent.
Over exploitation by humans causes massive destruction to natural ecosystems. Exploitation occurs for food (e.g. fish), construction (e.g. trees), industrial products (e.g. animal blubber), the pet trade (e.g. reptiles), fashion (e.g. fur) and traditional medicines (e.g. rhino horn). Selective removal of an individual species can unbalance ecosystems and all other organisms within them.
For the majority of humanity, our quality of life is better now than it ever has been in history. But that will change as we use up the planet's natural riches, as species become extinct, as populations continue to grow and as resources become more scarce.