Environmental crisis
Topic: Environment and Sustainable Development · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 7 "Environment and Sustainable Development"
Meaning
An environmental crisis happens when we push the environment past its carrying capacity, the limit within which it keeps working. Two conditions must hold for the environment to stay within that limit. Resource extraction must stay at or below the rate of regeneration. Waste must stay at or below the environment's power to absorb it. When either limit is broken, the environment fails at its third function, which is sustaining life. NCERT names two drivers: rising population in developing countries, and affluent consumption and production in developed countries.
Example
India's groundwater shows the crisis. Class 10 notes that one-third of the country already pumps groundwater faster than rain recharges it. It warns that 60% could do so within 25 years. When aquifers dry up, farms and towns lose their water.
Don't confuse with
- Environmental degradation: this is a fall in environmental quality through pollution, deforestation or soil erosion. It can happen gradually. A crisis is the stage where the limits have been breached and life-support itself fails.
Related concepts
- Environment
- Biotic and abiotic components
- Functions of the environment
- Renewable resources
- Non-renewable resources
- Reserves-to-production life
- Hotelling rule
- Carrying capacity
- Absorptive capacity
- Supply-demand reversal of environmental resources