Farming pollution can be controlled.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one-quarter of the world’s pollution is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions that come from agricultural methods. Plus, it increases to one-third if we add the processing activities and food handling.
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and researchers from Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research have discovered that fine-particular air pollution will start to decrease if industrial emissions continue to drop off, despite the expected increase in fertilizer usage and world food production.
According to Susanne Bauer, a climate scientist at Columbia University and NASA, it is certain that the human population will increase in the future and so will the need to produce enough food. Still, others believe that if we consider the amount of food waste dumped every year, then we should worry about the way we split this food so that everyone will benefit from it.
It is already known that the surface of the Earth is good enough to sustain a much larger human population than the present one. Moreover, plenty resources will provide us with enough food if they are efficiently managed. Plus, we need to preserve and maintain these resources so that we won’t run out of them.
The first source of air pollution in farming is ammonium. It is produced by livestock waste and heavily fertilized fields and then it enters as a gas in the atmosphere. After it has reached the air, it transforms into harmful aerosols by combining with other pollutants resulted from combustion.
The scientists do not know the exact details about the individual particles’ toxicology yet, but if a particle is small, then it is easier for it to travel into our lungs leading to severe consequences, such as cardiopulmonary mortality or cancer.
A recent study from the university’s Center for Climate Systems Research has established that the production of artificial fertilizer has increased from about 20 million tons in 1950 to 190 million tons nowadays. Plus, the amount of the aerosols that forms in the air depends on industrial and natural resources, season, time of day, precipitation, wind patterns and air temperature.
According to Bauer, a viable solution in the future might be to decrease combustion pollution resources, avoid growing crops or raising animals in areas where ammonium could mix with other pollutants, and reduce any excessive use of fertilizer.
Image Source:Wikipedia