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Intro to Enviro Science (Maori perspective) - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Solutions to environmental problems -
        • Not always technology based
        
        New ways of thinking
        
        New behaviours
        
        new laws and regulations
  - - - drivers of change in biodiversity - changes in land and sea use;
        
        direct exploitation
        
        climate change;
        
        pollution
        
        invasive alien species
  - - - Tropical ecosystems hit hardest by agricultural expansion - Tropical ecosystems have the highest levels of biodiversity on the planet
        -Between 1980 and 2000: 100 million hectares of tropical rainforest destroyed
        
        Latin America - 42 million ha converted to cattle ranching
        
        South East Asia – 7.5 million ha, 80% for palm oil
      - Ecosystem services • Ecosystem services = benefits that people obtain from ecosystems
        
        four categories
        
        Provisioning - e.g., the production of food and water
        Regulating - e.g., the control of climate and disease
        Supporting - e.g., nutrient cycles and crop pollination
        Cultural - e.g., spiritual and recreational benefits
      - Impacts on human well-being - Biodiversity & ecosystem are services important for human well-being
        
        Well-being of ca 3.2 billion people is affected by degradation of the Earth’s
        land surface
        
        Examples include: loss of access to drinking water, food and medicine, spread of disease by animal vectors,
        
        Loss of biodiversity is also a “developmental, economic, security, social and moral issue”
      - Natural resources: United Nations definition - Natural resources are natural assets (raw materials) occurring in nature that can be used for economic production or consumption.
        Context:
        • The naturally occurring assets that provide use benefits through the provision of raw materials and energy used in economic activity (or that may provide such benefits one day) and that are subject primarily to quantitative depletion through human use. They are subdivided into four categories: mineral and energy resources, soil resources, water resources and biological resources
      - • Renewable natural resources are natural resources that, after exploitation, can return to their previous stock levels by natural processes of growth or replenishment. Conditionally renewable resources are those whose exploitation eventually reaches a level beyond which regeneration will become impossible. Such is the case with the clear—cutting of tropical forests
        eg sunlight, wind, water, biomass
        
        • Non—renewable natural resources are exhaustible natural resources such
        as mineral resources that cannot be regenerated after exploitation
        eg coal& other fossil fuels, minerals
        
        Use of resources is accelerating - since 1980, • ~100% increase in extraction of renewable and non-renewable resources globally
        to ca 60 billion tons
        • 15% increase in global per capita consumption of materials
        
        Impacts of resource use - degradation and loss of habitats, production of waste
        
        Alteration of biogeochemical cycles (more to come in Prof Shulmeister’s lectures)
        
        2,500: conflicts over fossil fuels, water, food and land currently occurring worldwide
        
        Inequity in impacts of resource use - Environmental (and socioeconomic) burden of resource production and consumption not evenly distributed across
        
        Consumers are often very distant from where consumer goods are produced
        
        European Environment Agency: Seventh Environment Action Programme
        (7th EAP), which envisages that by 2050:
        
        We live well, within the planet’s ecological limits.
        Our prosperity and healthy environment stem from an innovative, circular economy where nothing is wasted and where natural resources are managed sustainably, and biodiversity is protected, valued and restored in ways that enhance our society′s resilience. Our low-carbon growth has long been decoupled from resource use, setting the pace for a safe and sustainable global society.
- - - - Did this cause a ‘megatsunami’?
        t has been proposed that a cluster of major tsunamis ‘during the mid-15th century, many Māori moved their settlements from low-lying coastal sites to hilltops and inland sites. A number of the abandoned coastal settlements show clear evidence of tsunami inundation.’
        Māori always lived mainly at the coast, and whether a higher proportion of the population was living inland after the sixteenth century than before has never been demonstrated – nor connected to tsunami incidence.
        Tsunamis have now been proposed as explaining many of the main events in Polynesian archaeology, but without compelling evidence.
        
        Aotearoa 1820s-1840 - Whaling a large part of the economy, with crews drawn mainly from Māori
        
        Te Awaiti (known to whalers as Tar’white), inside Tory Channel, recorded as largest settlement in South island in 1840
        
        By 1840 the whale numbers had declined making the industry uneconomic, and in 1844 the last of the early onshore stations closed
        
        Whaling resumed between 1900-1965 in Aotearoa International Whaling Commission data 1900-2015 -
        
        Dead sperm whale stranded at Paekakariki. Manawhenua recovering bone. Photographed by Evening Post staff photographer Phil Reid on the 20th of March 1996.
        Paikea at whare tīpuna, Whāngārā marae (Ngāti Porou)
        
        whales migrate paths to west antarctia
        
        - Timeline of major events in humanity’s connection to Antarctica, including Māori narratives of exploration
      - Manawhenua of the Southern Ocean -
        
        [Papatipu Rūnaka a Kāi Tahu
      - Whenua Hou/Codfish Is, archaeological sites, and barked totara indicative of nineteenth century tītī harvesting (Smith and Anderson 2007) -
      - Bi-Cultural management - Shearwater migrations originating from breeding colonies in New Zealand. (a) Interpolated geolocation tracks of 19 sooty shearwaters during breeding (light blue) and subsequent migration pathways (yellow, start of migration and northward transit; orange, wintering grounds and southward transit). The 30° parallels, equator, and international dateline are indicted by dashed lines. (b–d) Representative figure-eight movement patterns of individual shearwaters traveling to one of three “winter” destinations in the North Pacific. These tracks also represent those of three breeding pairs to reveal the dispersion and extent of each pair. -
      - Wairewa
        
        Wai a Māori
        “Keep challenging each other to improve the state of the environment” Gabrielle Huria Co-chair, Te Kura Taka Pini, Ngāi Tahu
- - - - Location of Pongakawa, Bay of Plenty
      - Kiwifruit expansion at Pongakawa -
      - Pikiraurahi, Te Pā Mahika Kai ki Awarua - 404-hectare sheep and beef farm in the heart of the internationally-recognised Awarua/Waituna wetlands, widely regarded as one of the last remaining expanses of relatively unmodified wetlands left in Aotearoa.
- - - - Fire, Drought and El Niño Southern Oscillation -
      - Seasonal and latitudinal contrast in nut production?
        
        In many montane societies, where people with their pigs migrate from villages to establish karuka harvest camps.
        This has not been described for the Goilala, where stands are perhaps the largest compared to other parts of New Guinea?
      - ‘Polynesian traditions first transcribed in the 19th century may account for the treeless island and the fallen moa’i of Rapa-Nui seen by James Cook in A.D. 1774. One tradition describes a war over depleted resources between two tribes, the Hanau Eepe and Hanau Momoko, in which most of the combatants from the defeated tribe were killed. A new political elite, the Orongo cult, emerged and are purported to have dismantled many of the moa’i in A.D. 1680, prior to European contact’
        
        popular science, societal collapse grand narrative driven by the synergy between palaeo/geoscience and archaeology
- - - - Sustainable development - United Nations 1987 Brundtland Report
        
        "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.“
        
        1992 United Nations Conference on Environment & Development
        • Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (178 governments)
        • Agreed 27 principles on sustainable development
        • Agenda 21 – action plan for sustainable development
        • Several follow up meetings
- - - - How much water is used and for what? • Drinking water
        • Irrigation
        • Industry
        • Hydroelectricity
        drivers of chnage
        • Amount of irrigated land has doubled
        • Shift from sheep and beef to dairy (more to come)
        • Decrease in average annual precipitation
      - Changed water flow • Aquifers ↔ groundwater, • Altered ecosystems, reduced habitat
        
        Altered sediment movement
        
        Increased temperature and concentrations of nutrients
      - Options for reducing water consumption? - education, reduced use off water in agriculture and industry, recycling off water "sewer mining"
      - Cultural and recreational impacts - cultural
        • Reduced harvest of mahinga kai species (e.g.
        tuna │ eels)
        • Loss of traditional knowledge
        • Navigability of waterways
        • Decreased flows reduce recreational use of waterways
      - Case study: global use of sand & gravel
        • Sand & gravel highest extraction volumes globally after water
        • Needed for infrastructure and industry, will be critical for delivery of the SDGs.
        • Produced through erosive processes on geological time scale
        • Rate of use exceeding rate of production in some parts of the world