Pages tagged with “runoff”

• Habitat Loss

  Coastal habitats – including coral reefs, seagrass beds, and mangroves – are home to 90% of known marine wildlife. They also provide us with the majority of fish catches and play vital roles as buffers against storms and sea level rise, and as stores of carbon.

• Pollution

  There are a great number of substances polluting freshwater systems, many of which come from industrial practices, methods of sanitation and waste management, direct use of water for transportation and sedimentation due to logging.

• Industrial Logging

  Logging for commercially valuable timber has been a major driver of forest loss and degradation across the tropics. Traditional logging techniques involve clear-cutting, which is attractive in tropical forests because of its high profitability, but devastating for wildlife and forest communities. Southeast Asian forests were decimated from the 1950s onwards by large-scale logging operations to produce timber for export around…

• Palm Oil

  The palm oil boom in South East Asia – 86% of the world’s supply comes from Indonesia and Malaysia – has had significant environmental impacts. Half of new oil palm plantations are established on highly diverse lowland forests in Borneo, Sumatra and Malaysia, causing extinctions and threatening others such as the orangutan. Peatland drainage for oil palm plantations has helped…

• Pollution

  Although they make up over 70% of the planet’s surface, there is no part of the oceans that is untouched by humans in some form. One of the most visible effects of this anthropogenic domination is pollution. This can take many forms; for example, agricultural fertilisers travel down rivers and spill out into estuaries, along with sediment and chemical waste.…