Desertification

Land Desertification refers to land degeneration, which is also called 'Soil desertification'(Figure 1）

Figure 1:Desertification

In 1992, United Nations Environment and Development Conference made this definition for Desertification concept: "Desertification is a result to the factors of climate change and human unreasonable economic activities, which makes degradation occurs in the arid, semi-arid and sub-humid lands.

Figure 2: Soil degradation around the world

With the development of the society, desertification has become not only an ecosystem problem, but also an economical and social problem which could bring poverty and social instability. by the end of 1996, the total amount of desertification lands all around the world has reached 36 million square kilometer, accounting for 25% of  total land area on the earth. Countries around the world affected by desertification has more than 100, although people of all countries are conducting fight desertification, but at an annual rate of 50,000-70,000 expanded square kilometers, equivalent Ireland area. The twentieth century, the world will lose about a third of arable land. In humans in many of today's environmental problems, desertification is one of the most serious disasters. For people threatened by desertification, desertification means that they will lose the basis of being more basic - the disappearance of productive land. As we could see from Figure 2, the most serious degradation concentrates on Africa, China and the countries around the Mediterranean.
The causes of Desertification is various, including natural causes, climate causes, and human irrational production activity. Based on the causes, the management of desertification is obvious.

Figure 3:Plant in the polygonal ground

1. Setting sand-protecting barrier at migratory dune to weaken the erosion of wind and at the meanwhile save the rainfall to promote plant growth.
2. Control the development density of water resources, biological resources and land resources and avoid over-destroy the natural plants. Therefore, protecting and rebuilding the desert ecosystem is the basic way to restrict the expansion of desertification.
3.Control the population. Keep the population in the range of Environmental Bearing Capacity.
4. Plant more psammophytes in the desert areas to prevent the expansion of desert and promote the quality of land.
5. Using the water resources in an efficient way in terms of drawing water, water delivery and irrigation.

All in all, in the desertification, human activities play an important role; therefore, it`s no time to delay for human to take some actions to protect our own earth!




Images from:
https://userscontent2.emaze.com/images/9ca73f3c-27dd-4c2b-92cb-2aed49f8981d/25362ee0-7b7e-46fd-a033-e7dae0973a01.png
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl-H-I12s0QlKwjb07X5Q3QS-Mr9tHx87kNDkENXITyCjBt2opQM5dkX90IhDOdYwIGL1J_ua2hEuL-dWFq74kjNi4LcqRILpVZHgodkxqIQyn5TLE6ngmFOszPcNa4ICcwRYQIiAYZDi7/s1600/ghana.jpg
http://medomed.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/dry-cracked-earth.jpg

How to prevent from school bullying?

How to prevent from school bullying?

  If we want to live in a high quality of life, we cannot just focus on the external environment, but also we should care about the internal situation which is the psychological health. Bullying is a kind adverse impact on individual health.

  

What is bullying?

  Bullying is the use of force, threat, or coercion to abuse, intimidate, or aggressively dominant others. The bullying is divided into four basic types of abuse:

1.    emotional (or can be called relational)

2.    verbal

3.    physical

4.    cyber

One of most serious kind of bullying is school bullying which is a type of bullying that occurs in an educational setting. The school bullying may be more specifically characterized by five aspects as the following:

• An intention to harm
• Victimization distress
• Repetition
• Power inequity
• Provocation

How to prevent this kind of problem?

  Many parents may concern more about this issue for that they are afraid of their children would be treated like that. First of all, parents should stay connected with your child. The more you know about his or her friends and the details about his or her interactions eith classmates and peers, the more likely you are to spot any changes in your child's social interactions. If you communicate well with your child, when they get in trouble, they may ask you for help at first.

  Secondly, you should explain to your children what is school bullying, especially young children, they may not understand that hitting someone is bad. And parents also should tell your childern other kinds of bullying behaviours.

  Then, the children should be aware of how to deal with a school bullying. Children should understand what is school bullying, and should be educated that they cannot do the bullying behaviours. However, when they face the situation, they also should know how to deal with this issue. Asking teachers for help is a effective method, teachers have the right to protect children and provide a healthy study environment.

  Children need a healthy and positive circumstances to study, and we adults should provide them this kind of surroundings.

Pictures from the following websites:

http://www.hero911.org/ways-to-stop-bullying-in-schools/

http://nobullismo.altervista.org/page/10/

Conservation Biology

Conservation Biology

  There are billions of species on our earth, and we human being is one of them. If we want to protect our planet, we should protect these variety of species. The term 'conservation biology' is derived from this reason. The conservation biology is tied closely to ecology in researching the dispersal, migration, demographics, effective population size, inbreeding depression, and minimum population viability of rare or endangered species (Benton and Ferry, 2010). 

  Conservation biology is concerned with with phenomena that affect the maintenance, loss, and restoration of biodiversity and the science of sustaining evolutionary processes that engender genetic, population, species, and ecosystem diversity. The biologists should work hard to protect those aspects by research and education. And in my opinion, there are not too many biologists, so we normal people should be involved in to this activity.

   Education is a good method to make our younger generation to be informed that the biodiversity is very important. We cannot live without those different species, and only all these creatures including our human beings live in harmony, we can make our planet become better.

   The approaches that we can do are simple. First of all, especially women should reduce to buy furs which are made by rare animals. There is a word, 'no business, no massacre'. If we restrict to buy them, those animals won't be killed. Second one is that we shouldn't involve much more in the wild animals, such as catching them into zoos, we should just leave them on the wild environment, and do not destroy their habitats.

   Although, we are not experts, but we should and we can do something indeed to protect our friends-other species, and our planet-Earth.

Picture from the following website:

http://www.frostburg.edu/home/academic/majorminors/graduate/master-of-science-applied-ecology-and-conservation-biology/

Who kills Our Communication Time?

Who kills Our Communication Time?

  With the increasing technology, people have more chance to buy a private phone. And those phones are smart phones which would help people to live a convenient life. 

  In the modern time, almost everyone processes a phone no matter he or she is a children or old person. We have to admit that those smart phones could help us to do much things. And I believe that in the future, the artificial intelligence could occur. However, there are some disadvantages of this kin of technologies. The first one comes to my mind is the loss of communication between persons. 

  

  Just like the picture above, we can see that two people site opposite to each other, but they are playing with their phones instead of talking to each other. This kind of phenomenon is very prevalent across the world. More and more people cannot live without phones. They ignore the importance of communication and social activities.

  As my experience, my boyfriend likes to play his Iphone 6 when we eat at the restaurant. I'd like to chat with him about my life and things that happened to me. When I see that he plays the phone, I just feel that I am ignored and he do not care about me. Over the time, people may be hard to communicate with others, and people may be easy to become strangers.

  Yes, technology could help to improve our life quality, however, we may lose many happiness on the phone.

Picture from the following website:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/19/world_goes_sim_free_leaving_sony_and_htc_trailing/

Could we save our habitat-Sea Level Rise Problem

Could we save our habitat-Sea Level Rise Problem

  Accelerated sea-level rise is one of the more certain consequences of greenhouse-induced climate change and would have many adverse impacts on the world’s coastline. The main reason which contributes to this phenomenon is the melting of ice sheets and glaciers (generally due to the global warming). 

  Nowadays, the argument of a global issue— sea-level rise constantly exists among the world. Because of the global climate change, the global temperature increases causing the melting of ice sheets and glaciers. However, there is a fact that should be noticed, the melting of marine surface ice do not directly contribute sea-level rise, on the contrary, the sea-level could fall because of the high marine salt concentration.

According to the 2013 IPCC report, it indicated that there is high possibility that the rate of sea level rise has increased during the last two centuries, and it is expectable that GMSL (Global Mean Sea Level) has expedited since the early 1900’s.

  As the increasing concern of this problem, we should find the solutions to mitigate the sea level rise. First we should understand the causes which lead to the issue. It is acknowledged that climate change is the major reason which may be responsible for the issue. If we can mitigate the climate change which focuses on the global warming, thus we can mitigate the sea level rise. How to solve this issue? There are some possible responses to global warming:

• Reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions

  There are many activities which may help to reduce the emission including: energy conservation and increased energy efficiency; the use of low-carbon energy technologies, such as renewable energy and nuclear energy.

• Policies to reduce the global warming

  Our government or international organisations should implement the related polices to limit the industry to release less polluted air which may increase the air temperature.

• Climate engineering

  This is also known as 'geoengineering' which is the deliberate modification of the climate.

  From those methods above, we could save our habitat from sea level rise. 

Picture from the following website:

http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/07/climate-scientist-sea-levels-could-rise-10-feet-by-2065/

Please Appreciate What We Have-Food Security

Please Appreciate What We Have-Food Security

  Food always is a global topic that many countries concern about the supply and demand. And the food price increases which draw attention of the world's policy-makers and news media to food security. How serious the situation is, we should understand this first. This blog will focus on this and provide some probable solutions for this global issue.

  

What is food security? 

  Food security has a various meanings, and the most common one is that food security is a condition related to the supply of food, and individuals' access to it. To be more specific, the food security does not mean that food which may be poisonous, but means food shortage. Concerns of food shortage have existed throughout history. At the 1974, World Food Conference defined the term 'food security' as an emphasis on supply. 

  This kind of global issue even occurs in the ancient China which was a large country of grain production. Food insecurity is not necessarily a lack of food, but is underpinned by a lack of accessibility to diverse produce, and the implications that has. In another words, the food shortage should include the diversity of food and nutrition.

Why there is food security?

  One of the reasons is agricultural industrialization. Using pesticide or chemical fertilizer may deteriorate the soil texture and pollute the underground water system. Increasing reliance on chemical fertilizers in agricultural production leads to declining crop yields, exacerbating global food crisis.

How to mitigate this issue?

  In order to mitigate this issue, we should find another way out to replace the agricultural industrialization. Some think that genetic engineering is a method to solve this problem, however there are also some drawbacks of this method. In contrast, there are some methods called 'Intelligent Farming' which includes the tillage methods may be beneficial to the biodiversity.

http://www.foodnavigator.com/Market-Trends/Africa-top-continents-set-for-food-demand-rise

http://environment.utk.edu/event/global-issues-conference/

We Need to Embellish Our City-The Urban Landscape Architecture

We Need to Embellish Our City-The Urban Landscape Architecture

The most important role of a city is to provide shelters for people who live in the city. And there are other three basic functions of a city;

• Political                                                         

         -Security 

         -Stability

         -Relative Calm

• Economic

         -General Commerce

• Social Welfare

        -Religious

        -Learning

        -Health

        -Recreation

        -Overall Quality of Life

  The urban landscape architecture is a kind of recreation for a city, and it is very important in the urban development. Although the basic function of a city is offering shelters for residents, people do not only need a house to live in, they also need some nourishment for the mind, and some spaces for entertainment and relax. The urban landscape should provide this kind of role for residents.

  Industrial Revolution brought a new design aesthetics, which focus on the machine. The machine was thought as a universal thing, therefore, coming out the Le Corbusier's rapid urbanisation model holding that a city was designed for the machine, and eventually turned into a machine. However, city is not a machine, it is a container. People who live in the city need space to entertain and relax after hard works. So the city need to provide some places which is open space for this reason. The only open space is not enough for residents, the space need to be decorated with trees and landscape.

  Landscape architecture is a multi-disciplinary field, it contains botany, art, design, and even some policies. A successful landscape design not only can improve the visual standard of a city, it even can improve the quality of residents' lives. The people who live in this city will feel comfortable and enjoyable.

Pictures from the following websites:

http://landarchs.com/top-10-landscape-architecture-projects-2015/