Climate Change and Pollution

Unlike the localized approaches to environmental problems that dominated the environmental policy arena from most of the 20th century, today’s challenges regarding climate change and pollution require a more complex understanding of its multi-scale causes and consequences. Threatening around 13% of the world’s biodiversity combined (WWF Living Planet Report 2020), climate change and pollution are thus prime examples of our contemporary challenges. Our responses need attention to human and ecological processes and both biogeochemical changes at a planetary scale and socio-political and economic decisions at a local and national scale. 

Focusing on critical issues impacting aquatic and coastal ecosystems such as the sea-level rise and plastic pollution, the chapters in this section embrace these difficulties across scales and actors. 

Considering mangroves as a cornerstone of life for coastal ecosystems and communities, the following two chapters examine the impacts of changes in this aqua-terrestrial ecosystem on biodiversity and coastal communities in less developed countries. Both chapters, “Mangroves: The Roots of an Ecosystem” and “Flooding Forests and Farmland: Sea Level Rise in Bangladesh​,” remind us of how human actions combinedly impact non-human species and the livelihoods, food security, and economies of the most vulnerable communities around the world. 

Addressing the problem from the perspective of two paradigmatic species, Sperm Whales and the Laysan Albatross, these chapters recenter the question about human-induced global environmental change on plastic pollution. Plastic has become a transboundary socio-ecological problem and a marker of human presence on Earth. However, by focusing on what plastic does in these species’ bodies, life cycles, and behavior, these two chapters highlight that the impacts of human presence are today embodied in the biological and life cycles of species.

All the chapters in this section remind us that the answers to environmental change and pollution are processes entangled on local and planetary dimensions and involve existential threats to human and non-human communities. Our ability to understand and face them from various perspectives and scales will be essential for our future on Earth.