July 08, 2019

Urban development on environmental problems

Forests provide many ecosystem services. They support biodiversity, providing critical habitat for wildlife, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, intercept precipitation, slow down surface runoff, and reduce soil erosion and flooding. These important ecosystem services will be reduced or destroyed when forests are converted to agriculture or urban development. For example, deforestation, along with urban sprawl, agriculture, and other human activities, has substantially altered and fragmented the Earth’s vegetative cover. Such disturbance can change the global atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the principal heat–trapping gas, as well as affect local, regional, and global climate by changing the energy balance on Earth’s surface (Marland et al. 2003).

http://www.choicesmagazine.org/magazine/article.php?article=49