Portal:Environment


Welcome to the Environment Portal
(image link)

Introduction

Land management has preserved the natural characteristics of Hopetoun Falls, Australia while allowing ample access for visitors.

The natural environment or natural world encompasses all biotic and abiotic things occurring naturally, meaning in this case not artificial. The term is most often applied to Earth or some parts of Earth. This environment encompasses the interaction of all living species, climate, weather and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity. The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished as components:

In contrast to the natural environment is the built environment. Built environments are where humans have fundamentally transformed landscapes such as urban settings and agricultural land conversion, the natural environment is greatly changed into a simplified human environment. Even acts which seem less extreme, such as building a mud hut or a photovoltaic system in the desert, the modified environment becomes an artificial one. Though many animals build things to provide a better environment for themselves, they are not human, hence beaver dams, and the works of mound-building termites, are thought of as natural. (Full article...)

Land management has preserved the natural characteristics of Hopetoun Falls, Australia while allowing ample access for visitors.

The natural environment or natural world encompasses all biotic and abiotic things occurring naturally, meaning in this case not artificial. The term is most often applied to Earth or some parts of Earth. This environment encompasses the interaction of all living species, climate, weather and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity. The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished as components:

In contrast to the natural environment is the built environment. Built environments are where humans have fundamentally transformed landscapes such as urban settings and agricultural land conversion, the natural environment is greatly changed into a simplified human environment. Even acts which seem less extreme, such as building a mud hut or a photovoltaic system in the desert, the modified environment becomes an artificial one. Though many animals build things to provide a better environment for themselves, they are not human, hence beaver dams, and the works of mound-building termites, are thought of as natural.

People cannot find absolutely natural environments on Earth, and naturalness usually varies in a continuum, from 100% natural in one extreme to 0% natural in the other. The massive environmental changes of humanity in the Anthropocene have fundamentally effected all natural environments: including from climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution from plastic and other chemicals in the air and water. More precisely, we can consider the different aspects or components of an environment, and see that their degree of naturalness is not uniform. If, for instance, in an agricultural field, the mineralogic composition and the structure of its soil are similar to those of an undisturbed forest soil, but the structure is quite different. (Full article...)

The Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Station

Iceland is a world leader in renewable energy. 100% of the electricity in Iceland's electricity grid is produced from renewable resources. In terms of total energy supply, 85% of the total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources. Geothermal energy provided about 65% of primary energy in 2016, the share of hydropower was 20%, and the share of fossil fuels (mainly oil products for the transport sector) was 15%.

The Icelandic government aspires that the nation will be carbon neutral by 2040. The largest obstacles to this are road transport and the fishing industry. (Full article...)
List of selected articles

Did you know (auto-generated) - load new batch

Selected image - show another

a bison skull pile, ca 1870.
a bison skull pile, ca 1870.
A pile of bison skulls (circa 1870).
The North American bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century and were reduced to very small numbers by the mid-1880s.

Current events

Selected biography - show another

Sumaira Abdulali, born 22 May 1961 is an environmentalist from Mumbai, India, founder of the NGO Awaaz Foundation and convenor of the Movement against Intimidation, Threat and Revenge against Activists (MITRA). She was co-chairman of the Conservation Subcommittee and honorary secretary of Asia's oldest and largest environmental NGO, the Bombay Natural History Society, and was a Governing Council Member between 2008 and 2021.

Through legal interventions, advocacy and public campaigns, contribution to documentary films, television debates and press articles she has successfully mainstreamed and built consciousness about previously unknown environmental hazards, notably noise pollution and sand mining, and has won national and International awards for her work. She also set up the first network for protection of activists in India after an attack on her by the sand mafia is 2004. (Full article...)

Selected organization - show another

IGBP

The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) was a research programme that ran from 1987 to 2015 dedicated to studying the phenomenon of global change. Its primary focus was coordinating "international research on global-scale and regional-scale interactions between Earth's biological, chemical and physical processes and their interactions with human systems."

The International Council of Scientific Unions, a coordinating body of national science organizations, launched IGBP. It looked at the total Earth system, the changes that are occurring, and the manner in which changes are influenced by human actions. (Full article...)
List of selected organizations

General images - load new batch

The following are images from various environment-related articles on Wikipedia.

Selected quote - show another

More did you know - show different entries

  • ... that each year in 22,500 cemeteries across the United States approximately 30 million board feet (70,000 m³) of hardwoods are buried as caskets?

Main topics

Related articles

Things you can do

  • This list is transcluded from the tasks list page. To edit the list, click here

Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Related categories

Related portals

WikiProjects

Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

Discover Wikipedia using portals

© MMXXIII Rich X Search. We shall prevail. All rights reserved. Rich X Search