Positive & Negative Human Impact
- The increasing human population and the activities of humans (including waste production, peat bog destruction, deforestation and our contributions to global warming) are causing a reduction in global and ecosystem-level biodiversity
- These activities are considered as negative human interactions with ecosystems
- There are, however, ways in which humans can interact positively with ecosystems
Methods to reduce negative impact on ecosystems & protect biodiversity
There are many conflicting pressures on maintaining biodiversity. Some examples include:
- The cost of programmes:
- Protecting biodiversity can be very expensive
- Eg. the land used for field margins could be used by farmers to grow crops and sell them – governments sometimes pay farmers a subsidy to make up for the lost money
- It costs money to check that programmes designed to maintain biodiversity are actually being followed
- Protecting food security:
- Land that is protected to maintain biodiversity could instead be used for farming – this can cause conflict in areas where there are food shortages
- Sometimes organisms seen as a threat by farmers (eg. locusts and wolves) are killed to protect crops and livestock – this can negatively affect food chains / biodiversity and can cause conflict when species that are already under threat due to hunting or habitat loss are involved (eg. lions in parts of Africa)
- The development of society:
- Increasing amounts of land are required to sustain the increasing human population
- Eg. land required for new housing developments or for new agricultural land in developing countries
- This high demand means that land with undisturbed habitats and high biodiversity is increasingly being used for development
