Sustainability and Solutions

Video Transcription

Hi. I'm Jensen Morgan. We're going to talk about some great concepts in environmental science. Today's topic is sustainability and solutions. So let's get started.

We're going to talk about sustainability and its relationship with harvesting of natural resources, protecting the environment, and managing human population growth. Sustainability is when human activities are performed so that their actions integrate with natural ecosystems in such a way that human activities can be performed indefinitely without harming the environment. Let's talk about sustainability in relation to harvesting natural resources.

Some sustainable actions that can be taken to address soil resources for food production are crop rotation, implementation of erosion control strategies, planting trees to stabilize the ground to hold soil in place, providing financial incentives like tax credits and subsidies for sustainable farming practices.

Sustainable efforts to address human water consumption are increased rainwater harvesting, design and development of new storage techniques, implementation of water conservation, water reuse, salt water desalination, more efficient irrigation, and improved access to safe drinking water.

Sustainability efforts to address fossil fuel consumption include improvement of energy transmission facilities' efficiency, as well as the distribution lines' efficiency, reduced overall fossil fuel consumption and scale up renewable energy sources, improve energy efficiency in industry, personal products, and automobiles.

Efforts to protect the environment, particularly in relation to climate change with sustainability in mind, include adjusting crop varieties and planting dates in response to climate change, designing buildings and roadways with climate change impacts in mind, setting aside geographic buffer zones where development cannot occur to prepare for sea level rise and flooding, and international cooperation to address climate change as a global issue.

Sustainable actions to protect the environment from pollution are planting crops in areas where they can easily grow without pesticides or fertilizers, implementing erosion control techniques to prevent erosion from running into waterways, rolling out financial incentives for sustainable practices through things like tax incentives and subsidies, and monitoring and controlling disease-related pollutants.

Efforts to reduce negative environmental impacts from pollution include reducing ecological footprint by increasing mass transit options, researching and developing new energy storage and creation technology, and utilizing more localized energy sources in a less centralized and more distributed energy grid. A distributed grid minimizes efficiency losses from transporting energy.

Finally, because population growth exacerbates most environmental problems, it is an important sustainability issue. Efforts that could be made to address human population growth through the lens of sustainability include creating new land use policies that limit certain types of development with the goal of limiting urban sprawl, planning municipalities to consider carrying capacity, and limiting the number of children families can have through policy.

Now let's have a recap. We talked about sustainability and its relationship to harvesting natural resources, protecting the environment, and managing human population growth. Well, that's all for this tutorial. I look forward to next time. Bye.