Planet Under Pressure
When a species disappears completely from Earth - not simply from one particular region - it has experienced this irreversible event.
What is extinction?
In the familiar phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” this action generally saves more resources and energy than recycling because it prevents waste from being created in the first place.
What is reduce?
Using one of these repeatedly instead of buying a new disposable plastic bottle every day can significantly reduce the amount of waste a person creates.
What is a reusable water bottle?
A person forced to leave home but who remains inside their own country is known by this three-word term rather than as a refugee.
What is an internally displaced person (IDP)?
Solar and wind belong to this category of energy because their sources are naturally replenished rather than permanently depleted by use.
What is renewable energy?
Bees, butterflies, bats, and other animals provide this vital service to flowering plants and many crops by transferring pollen between flowers.
What is Pollination?
A cafeteria normally prepares 500 lunches but regularly serves only 400. Composting the 100 unused meals is better than landfilling them, but this action would reduce the cafeteria's environmental impact even more.
What is preparing less food / preventing the waste in the first place?
Cheap, trendy clothing produced very quickly and designed to encourage consumers to constantly buy new styles is part of this controversial industry.
What is fast fashion?
This commonly used term describes people forced from their homes by rising seas, drought, flooding, or other climate-related effects, although it is not an official legal refugee category under international refugee law.
What is a climate refugee?
Instead of organizing monthly cleanups for hundreds of discarded plastic bottles, a school installs refill stations so fewer disposable bottles are used in the first place. This addresses the problem closer to its ______.
What is source/ root cause?
When environmental stress causes corals to lose the algae living in their tissues, reefs can turn white in a phenomenon known by this colorful name.
What is coral bleaching?
Although food is biodegradable, when it decomposes in the low-oxygen conditions of a landfill, it releases large amounts of this powerful greenhouse gas.
What is methane?
A company uses green packaging, images of nature, and words like “natural” and “eco-friendly” to make its product seem environmentally responsible without providing evidence to support those claims. This misleading marketing practice has a name.
What is greenwashing?
More than 2 billion people worldwide still lack access to this basic necessity when 'access' means a safe source available when needed and free from contamination.
What is safely managed drinking water / clean, safe drinking water?
A farmer grows several different crops instead of depending entirely on one. If disease destroys one crop, others may survive. This illustrates how greater ______ can make agricultural systems more resistant to disaster.
What is diversity / biodiversity?
Wolves disappear from an ecosystem. Deer populations increase dramatically, vegetation declines from overgrazing, and other animal populations eventually change. These effects spread through this network of interconnected feeding relationships among organisms.
What is a food web / ecosystem?
According to the UN, households around the world wasted more than this astonishing number of meals every single day in 2022.
What is one billion meals?
CLUE: Producing cotton requires a large amount of water. This everyday clothing item can require roughly 2,700 liters of water to produce—about enough drinking water for one person for 2½ years.
What is a T-Shirt?
A prolonged drought can destroy crops and leave communities without enough food, creating this condition when people lack reliable access to sufficient nutritious food.
What is food insecurity?
Limited public-transit access across parts of metro Atlanta means more people depend on cars. More cars, longer commutes, and more fuel burned can increase this measure of the region’s impact on climate change.
What is its carbon footprint?
Fertilizer runoff adds excess nitrogen and phosphorus to a lake, causing a massive algal bloom. When the algae die, decomposition uses up dissolved oxygen, creating areas where fish and other aquatic organisms cannot survive. These oxygen-depleted areas are commonly known by this ominous two-word name.What are dead zones?
What are dead zones?
Electronics thrown away worldwide—including phones, computers, televisions, and appliances—make up the world's fastest-growing stream of this kind of waste.
What is e-waste (electronic waste)?
Of all the plastic waste ever produced worldwide, only about this percentage has been recycled: 9%, 29%, 49%, or 69%.
What is 9%?
Rising sea levels threaten the existence of this low-lying island nation in the Indian Ocean, where about 80% of the land lies less than one meter above sea level.
What is the Maldives?
The year 2030 is often described as a critical climate deadline. If the world fails to sharply reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by then, avoiding some of the most serious effects of climate change becomes much harder. This dramatic phrase is often used to describe that deadline.
What is the point of no return?