While visiting the island of Mauritius last year, I got the opportunity to visit a coral reef conservation at one of the many beachfront hotels the island has. Here, I learned about local efforts that the island of Mauritius had been taking in order to protect marine life. The coral in the water is becoming more and more bleached and tourism is causing a lot of negative impacts on the environment. Tourism plays a positive role in the economy of Mauritius but the beaches are continuously being polluted by tourists, which will eventually make people not want to visit anymore.
Additionally, while driving around, I noticed a significant amount of trash on the sides of the roads. Since there is only one landfill on the island, there is nowhere to put it all and it eventually just ends up going into the oceans. It seems that people aren’t taught very well about caring for the environment in Mauritius; no one separates trash and no one recycles. However, the hotels along the beaches have decided not to use plastic straws in order to help out with the plastic issue, but there must be more efforts than this in order to make any progress because their government isn’t making very many changes to protect the environment. There have also been problems with invasive species in Mauritius, along with a lot of native plants disappearing. Additionally, there is a lot of native wildlife in Mauritius but since invasive species are being brought in, certain animals aren’t able to survive. For, it brings in a lot of new predators.
Not only is pollution an issue on the island, but so is global warming. However, global warming is impacting our entire planet. From the melting of the polar ice caps to the destruction of our ozone layer, global warming is becoming a dangerous threat, and if we don’t act soon and try to reverse the damage we have already done, it will plague earth for millions of years. It is a known fact that the earth goes through a naturally occurring temperature flux where the temperature will either drop or increase every few millions of years, but the increase of carbon offsets in astronomical numbers has sped this cycle up, which is unhealthy for the earth’s ecosystem. Any non-bias set of eyes can evaluate the evidence and clearly see that global warming is a real issue in today’s world and that it has been caused by humans in many different ways from pollution, to creating climate change.
In Mauritius, intense rainfall episodes and sea level rises have caused landslides, cyclones, and immense flooding. Over the last decade, climate change has led to many issues in today’s society like harder-hitting storms in not just Mauritius but also in the United States. An example of this is Hurricane Sandy. The warm water available at the time of the storm striking allowed the hurricane to do extremely uncommon things. This allowed Hurricane Sandy to pick up massive amounts of warm water, turn it into vapor, and (upon hitting land) dump it on top of our east coast. In years prior to Hurricane Sandy, this would have never been possible due to the fact that the Atlantic Ocean is usually cold naturally because of water current patterns. This produced major flooding all over the east coast, and almost put Manhattan completely underwater, which has never been done before. Climate change has significantly enhanced the effects of storms by creating higher water levels, giving the storms the ability to produce a much higher base than usual and pick up more water from the ocean on its way to land. However, it was also able to carry more water with it than seen from other storms in the past. Some scientists also believe that storms are becoming more powerful in the Atlantic Ocean due to ice caps declining in that area. This has been great news for the shipping industry who no longer needs to worry as much when looking out for icebergs, but it gives the ocean’s surface more room to absorb sunlight and heat at an even faster rate, which will diminish other ice caps even faster and create a speedy cycle of doing so (Freedman). We can see that climate change is a very high impacting accomplice when it comes to global warming.
All in all, global warming and pollution are detrimental subjects that we must face not only as a nation but as a coalition with other nations to combat it and stop it if at all possible. Every industrial nation is responsible for causing it in some way or another. Either out of ignorance or because it was a cheaper alternative to act one way, so we must work together to stop it so that we can preserve the earth for generations to come.
Source: https://www.climatecentral.org/news/how-global-warming-made-hurricane-sandy-worse-15190
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