Climate change and ecosystems
Climate change has adversely affected both terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and is expected to further affect many ecosystems, including tundra, mangroves, coral reefs, and caves.
Increasing global temperature, more frequent occurrence of extreme weather, and rising sea level are among some of the effects of climate change that will have the most significant impact.
Some of the problem with current and predicted atmospheric CO2 levels are:
- Increased occurrence of natural disasters
- Species decline and extinction
- Behaviour change
- Invasive species
- Wildfires
- Ocean acidification
- Marine dead zones
- Coral bleaching
- Algal blooms
- Disruption to water cycle
- Droughts
Some of this is already happening and it’s expected to get worse. A net-zero society in 2050 prevents it from reaching catastrophic levels, but it’s not solving the root problem. It’s simply too much CO2 in the atmophere.
To completely fix this problem the world has to become net-negative, that is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. There are plenty of good and safe solutions to do it.
The world needs a better and more ambitious vision than net-zero. A restored atmophere is what the world should aim for. Net-zero is a milestone towards that goal.
Humanity has done some serious CO2 pollution for just about 110 years and it’s time that we set a goal to clean it up.
This blog post is adapted from the Wikipedia article Climate change and ecosystems and it’s CC-BY-SA 3.0.