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Navindu Gupta
Indian Agricultural Research Institute
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1.1 Introduction
For the last four decades, several environmental problems—such as
pollution, global warming, ozone layer depletion, acid rain, deforestation,
and desertification—have remained a major focus of scientists, policy
makers, and common public across the world. These problems are
perceived as the major threats to the life-supporting environment of
the earth, thus making our survival on the planet increasingly unsafe.
In order to tackle these challenges, holistic knowledge about working
of our life-supporting environment and thorough understanding of the
dynamics of these problems become imperative. Since no other academic
discipline covers the above two knowledge requirements completely,
environmental science evolved as an academic discipline to fill in this gap.
Our life-supporting environment and various environmental problems
are highly complex and require interdisciplinary efforts to understand
them. Environmental science, therefore, integrates approaches of various
academic disciplines to fulfil its objectives.
Environmental science is defined as an interdisciplinary academic
field that integrates various academic fields (particularly sciences) to
study the structure and function of our life-supporting environment and
to understand causes, effects, and solutions of different environmental
problems. In other words, environmental science is the scientific study of
all the components or factors that make or influence our life-supporting
biophysical environment. As per some academicians, environmental science
is a methodological study of the environment and includes the study of all
biophysical as well as anthropogenic conditions or circumstances under
which an organism lives.
raising concern about environmental issues for the first time. Events
such as Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga River of Cleveland,
Ohio, “catching fire” in 1969 further helped increase the visibility of
environmental issues. Since the 1970s, environmental issues have been
addressed chiefly in terms of implications of development process on
environmental quality. The book Limit to Growth by Club of Rome
(1970) and Stockholm Conference (1972) drew the attention of the world
community towards environmental imbalance caused by the prevailing
patterns of development. In 1987, Brundtland Commission, in its report
“Our Common Future”, introduced the word Sustainable Development,
which emphasized the need for a development process that takes care
of the nature and the welfare of future generations. The Agenda 21
adopted during the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro (1992) and the
World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg (2002)
also contributed significantly to increase awareness about the need for
making the development process eco-friendly.
An increasing level of concern about environment was reflected in
the creation of a number of international environmental agencies and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including United Nations
Environmental Programme (UNEP), International Union for Conservation
of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), World Wide Fund for Nature
(WWF), and Global Environmental Facility (GEF). Similarly, numerous
scientific and policy-related forums and conventions were held for settling
environmental issues, including Ramsar Convention for conservation of
wetland fauna and flora, Montreal Protocol for protecting the ozone layer,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for quantifying
the extent of global warming, Kyoto Protocol for reducing emission of
greenhouse gases, and Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) for
preserving the rich biodiversity of the planet.
These developments in the field of environment were accompanied
by substantial enhancement in our scientific and overall understanding
about the environment, which in turn led to the creation of a new
academic discipline known as environmental science. The evolution of
the subject was driven by (i) the need for a multidisciplinary approach to
analyse complex environmental problems, (ii) the arrival of substantive
environmental laws requiring specific environmental protocols of
investigation, and (iii) the growing public awareness of a need for action
in addressing environmental problems. Since the 1970s, this subject has
been promoted worldwide and gradually included in the formal education
systems of different countries. For the subject to have widespread reach
and adoptability among common man, it is often catered by the name
Environmental Sciences: Scope and Importance 3
needs of life, that is, oxygen, water, food, and habitat. In fact, the
concepts of environmental sciences are based on this meaning. The
“essential life-supporting biophysical environment” is also termed
as “environment”, “natural environment”, “biophysical environment”,
“biosphere”, or “ecological system”. These words are used almost
synonymously.
2. Non-essential life-assisting environment: It includes all the
entities or processes that assist human life in various ways, but cannot
be considered essential for the physical survival of life on this planet.
It includes social systems, language, technology, economic system,
education, and various aspects of human civilization. Although we
can survive physically, without these entities the life will be largely
in wild or natural form. “Non-essential life-assisting environment”
is also known as “anthropogenic environment”, “social environment”,
“man-made environment”, or “built environment”.