Hugh Wilson, MSN Environment Contributor

The Environmental Issues We Ignore

Cows produce large amounts of methane (Image © Katie Collins/PA Archive/PA Photos)

You will have heard about the state of the Antarctic ice shelves, the animals threatened with extinction, and the potential flooding risk to London if worst case scenarios for global warming turn out to be true.

You’ll know about them, because they’re in the news on an almost daily basis. Issues like these are the fashionable face of climate change, the dramatic and headline friendly stories that have scientists and newspaper editors salivating.

They make good copy, and they grab public attention. They’re also just far enough away – geographically or chronologically – to keep panic at bay.

But there are other climate change stories that are far less well known. They don’t lend themselves to spectacular aerial pictures, or to the latest in computer generated graphics (think melting ice shelves crashing into oceans, or CGI mock-ups of flooded city streets).

But they are real, and just as great a threat to a sustainable planet as their more glamorous counterparts. Welcome to the world of the unsexy environment story, and three major issues the world should probably be talking a lot more about.

Methane emissions and livestock

It causes more greenhouse gasses than cars and lorries, and every time you bite into a burger you become part of the problem. According to a report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions than cars and planes. It’s also a major source of land and water degradation.

Graphic: Why we should stop eating meat

And it’s getting worse. Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tonnes.

Livestock farming accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane – a greenhouse gas 23 times as warming as CO2

Overpopulation is a major environmental problem

So why don’t we hear more about it? It’s partly because countering the environmental cost of animal agriculture would hit us where it really hurts – on our dinner plates. The easiest solution is to drastically cut down our meat and dairy consumption. Not a popular measure.

But there are moves to reduce the methane emissions of livestock by making changes to their diet. No more baked beans it would seem…

Feature: Should we stop eating meat?

Overpopulation

To put it simply, there’s too many of us. At least, that’s what a number of population and environmental scientists believe. World population is projected to rise from today's 6.8 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050. In the UK, population is officially projected to rise from 60.6 million to 77 million in the same period. According to groups like the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), those numbers are simply not sustainable.

In fact, the OPT goes much further. It believes that the Earth may not be able to support more than half its present numbers, and that the UK's long-term sustainable population level may be lower than 30 million.

We should be working harder to protect our soils (Image © Rick Rycroft/AP/PA Photos)

So why is population growth so far behind the fate of the polar bear in column inches devoted to climate change? It’s partly because the figures are disputed. No one disputes that population growth is a problem, but many of the more extreme figures are controversial. The OPT itself is often accused of scare-mongering.

Universal sex education and access to contraceptives, better schooling and opportunities for the poor – particularly the poor in faraway places like India, China and some African countries, where overpopulation is endemic - might be effective, but they don’t make great copy for the media.

How Britain could lead the way on renewable energy

Soil Erosion

Dirt isn’t sexy. Mud is never going to make a good picture caption (unless it’s plastered over semi-naked festival-goers). But soil erosion is probably one of the most important, and least well-known, of our major environmental problems.

Don’t take our word for it. Take the Dalai Lama’s:

“The threat of nuclear weapons and man's ability to destroy the environment are really alarming. And yet there are other almost imperceptible changes - I am thinking of the exhaustion of our natural resources, and especially of soil erosion - and these are perhaps more dangerous still, because once we begin to feel their repercussions it will be too late.”

Scientists say that soil erosion is as big a problem as global warming, but largely ignored. We get nearly all our food from soil, and yet, according to the UN, an area big enough to feed Europe - 300m hectares - has already been so severely degraded that it can no longer sustain crops. Like global warming, it’s a problem we’ve largely created ourselves. Cutting down the trees that protect topsoil from wind and rain is a major cause of soil erosion.

According to Jared Diamond, a physiologist at the University of California, soil isn’t a priority because it isn’t as spectacular as forest fires, logging or melting ice shelves. But he warns that soil erosion and associated food shortage have caused societies in the past to implode. On Easter Island in the Pacific, for example, soil erosion lead to a society that “ended up in cannibalism”.

That should be reason enough – surely - to get some real dirt in the dailies.

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