The Exploitation of Natural Resources for the Benefit of the Human Population - Essay Example

Task: Geography One of the core principles relating to the environment is the need to ensure sustainable development. This refers to the implementation of strategies that embrace development activities that best meets the demands of the present population while ensuring the future population’s ability to benefit, as well, from the environment (Baker 20). The increasing rate of human population growth, however, remains top among the challenges of attaining sustainability in environment. Given the challenge, any strategy geared at attaining set priorities related to the environment and population become plausible.

The world agenda on development, as implemented by international bodies as the UNEP intends to create harmony between the escalating growth of human population and environmental concerns. In ensuring harmony between population and environment, bodies and organizations responsible for ensuring sustainable development recommend the application of strategies that would reduce acute environmental pollution. The high human population growth rate translates to a consequential increase in food production.

This initiates innovation of production processes that would guarantee food security for the high human population. Through the adoption of clean production technologies, environmental degradation would reduce to minimal levels possible. Priority, therefore, should be on the use of clean production techniques. Conducting impact assessments for projects and their feasibility is core to ensuring developments and projects embrace environmental concerns and mitigate any possible negative outcome.

The use of clean production techniques would have other related importance as the prevention of land and water resources degradation. Industries should set process and product quality standards requirements. This would ensure clean production processes that produce minimum waste and pollutants. Clean production standards would control the rate of carbon emission into the atmosphere and, in turn, the consequential effects as greenhouse gasses accumulation in the atmosphere. Regular monitoring of production processes is vital in ensuring compliance to set standards for production.

Governing the limited environmental resources poses a considerable challenge to responsible agencies and organizations. Amidst the high demand for and human consumption of natural resources, realization of sustainability of resources is a global environmental challenge. Prioritizing development planning, at national and international levels, is a vital tool to tackling the challenge. Development planning aids the sustainable exploitation of environmental resources, in the process of attaining the requirement of the increasing world human population.

Prioritizing development planning promotes environmental governance and management. Governments should, as a measure to ensure environmental conservation, set laws and regulations that provide for national development planning. Development planning would prevent possibilities of the overexploitation of natural resources by the high population. In ensuring sustainable exploitation of natural resources for the benefit of the human population, there should be set institutions to implements development panning.

Setting up national and international institutions and bodies is a key factor that should be a priority of governments. Through such institutions, commitment to ensuring the fulfillment of environmental goals is achievable. Such institutions act as agencies of implementing priorities as provision of awareness to the population on sustainable environmental practices. The provision of awareness acts as a strategy to ensure sustainable resource exploitation, in ways that discourage the occurrence of externalities.

Planning for scarce environmental resources to satisfy a high human population remains a challenging task. Setting up priorities, however, remains an indispensable measure to ensure sustainable development. Work Cited Baker, Susan. Sustainable Development. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. Print.