Oldal 21 [21]
OCR
Chapter 1. Foundation vividly described in the writings of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle.” Air pollution levels continue to cause serious health problems today, which is why EU environmental legislation has made it a priority to reduce air pollution levels. Global climate change and global warming threaten the entire Earth’s ecosystem. As a result, since the 1992 Rio Conference, intensive efforts have been made to establish conventions to curb further adverse changes, but recent estimates suggest that current commitments are far from sufficient and need to be renewed and expanded. Habitat degradation, biodiversity loss, and species extinction are interlinked phenomena and are today’s most critical environmental challenges. The persistence of species is under significant threat from the loss of natural habitats and the negative impacts of global warming, such as permanent climate change and rising or falling temperatures. However, a leading cause of increased extinction is the economic exploitation of species. The extinction of species is essentially a natural phenomenon in the living world. Still, human activity in recent centuries, especially in the 20th century, has led to the disappearance of a much higher number of species than the natural extinction, ranging from 5 to 20 thousand species per year. If this trend continues, around 10 per cent of all species could be threatened with extinction.’ Today, communities living in symbiosis with their environment have been replaced mainly by urbanised societies. Urbanisation itself has a negative impact on the environment, including concentrated air pollution and waste production and alteration of the natural environment for industrialisation and urban development.” Another issue is that some criminal activities also have a negative impact on the environment and the survival of species. Today, a number of organised criminal groups are involved in the illegal trade of endangered species, either in derivatives such as products of traditional medicine or in live specimens. This phenomenon has also attracted the attention of the international community, as the financial flows of illegal trade have now reached the level of revenues from drug and arms trafficking. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and other international entities such as Interpol and Europol are also working to Martinez, Julia: Great Smog of London. Britannica. Available at: https: //www.britannica.com/event/Great-Smog-of-London. Kaiho, Kunio: Extinction magnitude of animals in the near future. Nature, Scientific Reports, Vol. 12. 2022, p. 19593. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-23369-5. Zipperer, Wayne C. - Northrop, Robert - Andreu, Michael: Urban Development and Environmental Degradation. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science, 2020, pp. 1-25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.97 19
