This document discusses several types of environmental resource depletion including deforestation, mining, and global warming. It outlines the impacts of these activities such as releasing greenhouse gases and loss of biodiversity from deforestation, land erosion and water contamination from mining, and rising sea levels and spread of pests from global warming. The document also discusses solutions to depletion like proper resource management and financial instruments as well as the relationships between poverty, environmental stress, and destruction of local environments.

1. Environmental resource depletion
Environmental sciences

2. Environmental Resource
Depletion
 Deforestation
 Environmental Impacts of Mining
 Global Warming
 “Tragedy of the commons”—overfishing
and other

3. Jungle burned for agriculture in southern Mexico

4. Environmental impacts caused by
deforestation
 Burning forests and decay of wood after
logging contribute to the release of
greenhouse gases
 Loss of biodiversity
 Forests are important parts of hydrologic
cycle in nature

5. Chuquicamata, the largest open pit copper mine in the world, Chile

6. Iron hydroxide precipitate
stains a stream receiving
acid drainage from surface
coal mining.

7. Environmental impacts of mining
 Land/soil erosion
 Formation of sinkholes,
 Loss of biodiversity in the area
 Contamination of ground waters by
chemicals from the mining process and
products.
 Abandoned mines can still pose safety
hazards such as deadly gases

8. Chemicals used for mining
 Sodium cyanide for extraction of gold
 Sulphuric acid for extraction of copper
from copper oxides
 If these chemicals are not handled
properly, serious environmental impacts
may occur to the neighbouring
environment

9. Greenhouse gases
 Phenomenon by which the earth’s
atmosphere traps infrared radiation or heat.
 Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide
(CO2), methane, nitrous oxide, and water
vapor, that keep the earth habitable, and
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

10. Components of greenhouse
effect (1990)
 Carbon dioxide (from coal, oil, natural gas,
and deforestation) 57%.
 CFCs depleting stratospheric ozone layer
25%.
 Methane (from wetlands, rice, fossil fuels,
livestock, & landfills) 12%.
 Nitrous oxide (from fossil fuels, fertilizers,
and deforestation) 6%

13. Environmental Effects of
Global Warming
 Melting of permafrost and polar ice
 Rising sea level
 Spread of pests and disease
 Ecological impacts (e.g. disturbed life
cycle of flora-fauna)

14. Solution of depletion
 Some suggested that overexploitation of a
resource can be solved by proper
management of the property right to use
the resource.
 Licensing and tradable quota are some
possible financial instruments.

15. Poverty
 Poverty is the pronounced deprivation of
well-being. It is not being able to satisfy
ones basic needs because one possesses
insufficient money to buy services or lacks
the access to services.
 Absolute poverty refers to the state of
severe deprivation of basic human needs,
which commonly includes food, water,
sanitation, clothing, shelter, healthcare,
education and information.

16. Conti……
 Relative poverty refers to as being
below some relative income threshold,
where this threshold differs for each
society or country.
 One may be relatively poor, without being
in the state of absolute poverty; relative
poverty is often considered as an indirect
measure of income inequality.

17. Causes of Poverty
 Lack of education
 Natural disasters
 Lack of money
 Greed ( addictions)
 Overpopulation
 No opportunities provided

18. Poverty & environmental stress
 People living hand-to-mouth existence
more likely to destroy their immediate
environment (e.g., Nepalese collecting
firewood denuded forests on the hills &
mountains).
 Poor, landless people often forced to
cultivate marginal lands.