Human health depends upon reliable access to sufficient quantities and varieties of food.
Many food sources are affected by global changes. Source: Pixabay
A variety of human and environmental changes can cause changes to food availability and nutrition, including:
- Decreased availability of freshwater for agricultural activities.
- Decreased soil quality.
- Habitat loss that destroys populations of species harvested for food.
- Extreme weather events that damage fisheries, crops, and livestock.
- Overfishing or over hunting that decrease species populations.
- Pollutants and waste that damage crops or species populations.
- Invasive species that harm crops or livestock, either directly or indirectly via diseases they carry.
- Human population growth, which requires more food to sustain healthy populations, and which effects the environment in a great many ways.
Can you think of additional cause and effect relationships between food availability and nutrition and other parts of the Earth system?
Visit the freshwater quality and availability, air quality, and the displacement of human populations pages to explore more connections between food availability and nutrition and global changes.
Investigate
Learn more in these real-world examples, and challenge yourself to construct a model that explains the Earth system relationships.
- Antibiotic resistant bacteria at the meat counter
- GMOs struggle to stay one step ahead of evolution
- Better biofuels through evolution