Abstract
Background: Environmental problems are on a hike. The study provides evidenceof the links between man-made environmental issues based on cause-and-effect relationship from real-world examples. For instance, man-made climate change is caused primarily by deforestation, draining of wetlands, intensive farming, and air pollution (greenhouse gas emission). Also, each of these problems, air pollution for instance, is caused by intensive farming, burning of fossil fuels (because of the global energy crisis), urbanization, and methane emission from solid waste dumps. Deforestation is mainly caused by increasedhuman population, poverty, overexploitation of natural resources, urbanization, mining minerals, intensive farming, the establishment of dams, wildfires during El Niño, acid rain, and global warming (cyclic as cause and effect). Besides, every man-made 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.Results: About 252 links were examined among 40 identified environmental issues. In this web, certain causative environmental problems were established as “keystone links”. Possible keystone environmental problems were identified from the concept map based on the criteria given by the following approach, when mitigating a man-made environmental problem, if it results in the permanent disappearance of one or more man-made environmental problems, then that mitigated problem can be considered as a possible keystone environmental problem in a hypothetical situation where human adaptability factors such as economic, social, and political factors are absent.Conclusions: Eight man-made environmental problems were found as keystones such as air pollution, deforestation, population explosion, overexploitation of natural resources, global energy crisis, intensive farming, water pollution-water scarcity, and urbanization-urban sprawl-settlements.
Keystone Links of Anthropogenic Environmental Problems and Emergence of Interconnected Man-made Environmental Crises
