Environmental Crisis and Sustainable Development

• Riyadh

  One of the most polluted cities in the world
•  Greenpeace India reported that in 2015, air pollution in the country was at its worst, aggravated by the Indian government's inadequate monitoring system (there were only 17 national air quality networks covering 89 cities across the continent).
• West Africa 


  Pollution in this country has affected "the atmospheric circulation system that controls everything from wind and temperature to rainfall across huge swathes of the region."
• The Asian monsoon

  Had become the transport of polluted  air into the stratosphere, and scientist are now linking Pacific storms to the spread of pollution in Asia.  
•  An archived article in the journal Scientific American blamed the pollution for "contributing to more than half a million premature deaths each year at the cost of hundreds of billions dollars.
• In Metropolitan Manila, 37 percent (4 million people) of the population live in slum communities
• Governments believe that for their countries to become fully developed, they must be industrialized, urbanized and inhabited buy a robust middle class with access to the best of modern amenities.
•  Governments have their own environmental problems to deal with, but these states' ecological concerns become worldwide due to global warming
•  Global warming

  is the result of billion of tons of carbon dioxide (coming form coal-burning power plants and transportation), various air pollutants, and other gases accumulating in the atmosphere.
•  The greenhouse effect 

  is responsible for recurring heat waves and long droughts in certain places, as well as for heavier rainfall and devastating hurricanes and typhoons in others.
•  In India and Southeast Asia, global warming altered the summer monsoon patterns, leading to intermittent flooding that seriously affected food production and consumption as well as infrastructure networks. 
•  Category 4 and 5 typhoons, like the Super Typhoon Haiyan that hit the central Philippines in 2013, had "doubled and even tripled in some areas of the (Southeast Asian) basin. Scientist claim that there will be more (of such) typhoons in the coming years.
•  Glaciers are melting every year since 2002, with Antarctica losing 134 billion metric of ice.
•  There is a coastal flooding not only in the United States eastern seaboard but also in the Gulf of Mexico.
•    Flooding has allowed more breeding grounds for disease carriers like the Aedes aegpyti mosquito and the cholera bacteria.
• 1997, 192 countries signed the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases
• 1992 United Nations Earth Summit where a Framework Convention for Climate Change was finalized.
• Framework Convention for Climate Change


  The protocol set targets but left it to the individual countries to determine how best they would achieve these goals.
• Pollution Diet of 1970


  In Japan, population pressures forced the government to work with civil society groups, academia, and political parties to get the parliament to pass a blizzard of laws- 14 passed at once.