Disaster
Disaster
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'Environmental disasters’ are the harmful catastrophic impacts on the environment either due to natural causes, anthropogenic causes, or both. It results in the death and disease of living beings including man, animals, and plants. It causes widespread material, social, economic, or environmental losses.
Natural Disasters: Natural phenomenon like the rotation of the earth, tectonic plate movement, wind movement, weather conditions, etc., might get disrupted and causes different environmental disasters.
Earthquake- It is caused due to release of energy from the inside of the earth. The seismograph records the waves reaching the surface and detects earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. The magnitude and intensity of earthquakes are measured by Richter and Mercalli scale, with the range of 0-10 and 1-12 respectively.
Volcanic eruption: It is a process where inner earth materials like ashes, gases, molten rock, or lava, escapes into the surface. Some volcanos happen within the ocean. They occur majorly in the mid-ocean ridges of the Atlantic Ocean, the longest mountain chains submerged in the ocean.
Landslides: It is a type of denudation process of the earth which involves the downward move-ment of rocks, soil, debris, or an amalgamation of all such materials. It usually takes place in mountains or hilly regions. It is majorly caused by an offshoot of flash floods.
Floods: They are the most common type of disaster leading to submerging of the land surface due to overflow of water. It is due to prolonged heavy rainfall for hours or days, or due to flash floods. Flash floods are sudden, localized, short-spanned (within six hours) heavy rainfall causing fatal damages. In India, 12 percent of the land is prone to floods and river erosion.
Tropical Cyclone: They are the violent storms that originate in tropical oceans causing heavy rainfall, high wind speed, and storm surges. They cause large destruction when they move to coastal areas. They are known as Cyclones in the In-dian Ocean, Hurricanes in the Atlantic, and Typhoons in Western Pacific.
Extreme temperature (cold and heatwave): Extreme temperature events have been increasing globally with an increase in their frequency, magnitude, and duration. This is hampering the life of people physiologically by amplifying the existing health conditions, increasing premature deaths and disabilities.
Drought: It is a prolonged period when an area experiences extremely low precipitation, leading to a shortage of water19. This further decreases groundwater level and soil moisture damages crops and might lead to extreme food scarcity conditions or famine.
Wildfires: it is an unplanned, uncontrolled, unintended fire that burns up an area of combustible vegetation. When it is set up in a forest area, it is known as a forest fire. If it burns out scrub vege-tation with small woody shrubs, it is known as a bushfire.
Man-made Disasters: The greed of man is adding to already existing natural disasters. The develop-mental aspiration of humans is only fulfilling their selfish needs of being economically developed. But the fact that the holistic development of man can be attained only through environmental sustainability is being neglected. Overpopulation, rampant development leading to deforestation, pollution, etc., is in-creasing the frequency of environmental disasters.
Industrial Disasters: They are the result of accidents, mishaps, misuse, or failure in the mass production process of goods and services. They may lead to great damage, injury, or loss of life and hamper the environment extremely. There are different types of industrial disasters like a chemical leak, oil spillage, explosion, radiation leak, building collapse, mass poisoning, industrial fire, etc.
Air pollution: The recent declaration of Air Emergency in Delhi on November 2021 and imposition of lockdown to decrease its impact, depicts the severity of anthropogenic disasters. According to WHO, 14 out of 15 most polluted cities are in India. Centre for Science and Envi-ronment (CSE) points out that, most of the Indian cities should de-crease PM 10 by 50% to attain WHO established standards.
Water Pollution: As per the NITI Aayog report released in June 2019, India is facing the worst-ever water crisis in history. Approximately 600 million people or roughly around 45 % of the population in India are facing high to se-vere water stress. Upon that we are treating the water as a sink of sew-age, and solid waste than an available limited resource. Water pollu-tion is due to the mere negligence of man against the water resource and its overexploitation.
Plastic Pollution: Plastic is a non-biodegradable substance that remains on earth for a very long-time polluting water and land. It affects human health greatly, kills plants and animals, upsets the food chain of the ecosystem. When plastic is burnt it produces cancerous furans and dioxins caus-ing air pollution. As many toxic chemicals are used to manufacture plastic products, they might be poisonous to all living beings in a long run. Hence it is an element causing pollution at every level which needs to be avoided.
Global warming is caused due to anthropogenic activities like deforestation, urban development, industrial development, use of chlorofluorocarbon, use of vehicles, intensive agricultural activi-ties, overpopulation, etc.