Overexploitation of natural resources: causes and consequences

Humans have spent our entire lives altering ecological communities and ecosystems by taking advantage of what nature offers us, although in the past it was much more measured or reduced than today, since we were less human and with fewer tools.

So what causes the depletion of natural resources? , the clear answer is uncontrolled human activities that cause excessive exploitation of natural resources , which does not allow their regeneration in time, causing some to be lost and others to be at serious risk.

Therefore, the overexploitation of natural resources is the excessive exploitation of these, that is, it occurs when humans abuse these resources that the planet offers us to the point that we do not allow them to renew in time and even exhaust them. Today we have reached the overexploitation of wood, forests, marine or oceans, animals, and so on. That is to say, today we carry out overexploitation of renewable and non-renewable natural resources.

This fact causes great problems throughout the planet, although we may not realize it at first, such as the extinction of animals and plants, increased global warming and many more.

Examples of overexploitation of natural resources

• Overexploitation of soils.
• Large-scale mining.
• The indiscriminate felling of trees that produces deforestation.
• Overfishing or excessive fishing that devastates the seabed and destroys habitats and species.
• The extraction of vast amounts of fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal. These natural resources, as they are not renewable, have a greater problem with excessive exploitation, since they will be depleted much earlier than expected.
• The water resource is increasingly overexploited and this is a great risk because, despite being a renewable resource, now due to the high pollution it suffers we can no longer use it in the same way or regenerate in the same way.
• Animals and plants are increasingly exploited, both to keep them at home or in zoos, and to trade with them for food, medicine, tissues, and so on.

What is overexploitation of natural resources for children

The simple definition of overexploitation of natural resources explained for children can be summarized as follows:

The overexploitation of natural resources is what happens when people use too much what nature offers us, for example it offers us a few trees for wood but we take many more or it offers us many fish but we take even more. That we do this with what nature offers us means that the planet cannot recover well in time, that is, not enough trees grow, enough fish are born, new plants grow or more mountains become. This means that in a few years we will not have as many resources as before.

What causes the overexploitation of resources? It is important to know this, since knowing what the overexploitation of natural resources is but not taking into account the reasons why it happens implies that we will not find a good solution. Thus, now we explain what are the main causes of overexploitation of natural resources :

• Increase in human population: as in recent decades our population has increased exponentially, there are more and more basic human needs to cover, more people need resources to be able to live.
• Increase in human activities and demand: implicit in the previous point, it should be noted that from the last decades to the present, the activities that people do every day have increased a lot and, therefore, much more is fished, they are cut down more trees, more oil is extracted …
• Inappropriate use of natural resources: in the past we reused more all the materials that came to us, we even took more care of the food we had so as not to waste it, but today as we can easily buy new things we waste everything, we have more greed than ever and we waste. This makes us spend more what we get from nature while polluting more. Therefore, our civilized society has become a problem for the planet, having lost the bases of coexistence with nature.

Now that we know what this global problem is about and what its causes are, all of them related to our activities, we will talk about the consequences and effects on the planet and our species. What are the consequences of overexploitation of natural resources? We can list the following as the main consequences, but there are many more.

• Destruction of natural habitats, both terrestrial, marine and other aquatic.
• Destruction of ecosystems of all kinds.
• Extinction of animal and plant species.
• Disruption of trophic networks and relationships .
• Soil desertification, the land loses nutrients and forests or jungles cannot be grown or grown.
• Increase in environmental pollution .
• Increase in global warming and climate change.
• When a natural resource begins to become scarce, its price increases in the market, so another consequence is that everything we need to live costs us more money, we no longer talk about materials, objects and other extras, but about the basics.
• Poverty is increasing throughout the world, hence also hunger, deaths from treatable diseases, etc., that is, the basic quality of life is drastically reduced.
• Natural resources are depleted, that is, they are extinguished and can no longer be recovered, so we will have to stop having them and change habits or materials.

Fortunately, of course, there are several actions that we can take to curb and reduce this problem. Thus, these are some of the possible solutions for the overexploitation of natural resources :

• If consumers reduce or eliminate the consumption of products that we do not really need to live, but rather are fads, then companies will produce less and use fewer resources.
• Consume local and seasonal products, instead of products that have to come from other parts of the world or have been produced with by-products from other distant places. Thus, there is less pollution and excessive exploitation of farmland in other regions of the world.
• Learn to use the 3Rs of ecology correctly, so we reduce our consumption, reuse everything we can and, finally, recycle, since the materials can have different lives and until they are completely degraded, it is not necessary to extract more of the nature.
• Ask governments to act by facilitating the above points, helping to make society more ecological.
• Volunteer or financially help associations and NGOs that fight to take care of the planet and / or raise awareness of the problems caused by the overexploitation of natural resources.

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