BIOL 350 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Arable Land, Carbon Sink, Soil Retrogression And Degradation
15 Apr 2020
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Document Summary
>> we will now examine seven of the main problems of input in our assessment of the current state of civilization. Only about 3% of the earth"s surface can be used to grow food. Virtually all of this land that can be cultivated economically then already is. We can"t expect to grow significantly more food by increasing the amount of land under cultivation. This figure shows where most of the world"s food is grown. Areas in which at least 30% of the landscape is cultivated. America, and africa have transformed over 200 million hectares of habitat area into arable and cropland. Arable land per capita is expected to drop by 20 to 40% over the first 25 years of this century due to a combination of climate change, soil degredation, urbanization, water shortages, plus rising population sizes. In some cases, mineral extraction has doubled in the 30-year period between 1970 and 2000.
