Investigation into the Interconnected Nature of Environmental Problems and Identifying Keystone Environmental Problems

Abstract

The study depicts the links between man-made environmental issues based on cause-and-effectrelationships from real-world examples. For instance, man-made climate change is caused primarily bydeforestation, draining of wetlands, intensive farming, and air pollution (greenhouse gas emission).Besides, every anthropogenic environmental problem may cause various other environmental problems,such as air pollution causes ocean acidification, ozone depletion, acid rain, disease, and visual pollution(smog). Similarly, deforestation causes biodiversity loss, land degradation, and human-animal conflict.About 255 links were examined among 40 identified environmental issues. In this web, certain causativeenvironmental problems establish keystone links. Keystone environmental problems were identified fromthe concept map based on the criteria given by the following approach. When mitigating a man-madeenvironmental problem, if it results in the permanent disappearance of one or more man-madeenvironmental problems, then that mitigated problem can be considered a keystone environmentalproblem. To be specific, a complete dependency of the resulting environmental problem/s on the parentenvironmental problem has enabled the parent environmental problem to be considered a keystoneenvironmental problem. This is because if the causative parent issue gets solved, then the resultingoffspring/s cannot exist. Eight man-made environmental problems were found as keystones, such as airpollution, deforestation, population explosion, overexploitation of natural resources, global energy crisis,intensive farming, water pollution-water scarcity, and urbanization (industrialization)-urban sprawlsettlements.
 Keywords: environment, environmental problems, manmade environmental problems, keystoneenvironmental problems, interconnected environmental problems