Economic Growth Cause And Effect Essay

2. What are the consequences of economic growth on our planet Earth?

Economic growth is “the most fundamental indicator of an economy’s health”. They define it as the rate of growth of the national income of a country, measured by the annual percentage rate of change of country’s gross domestic product. According to Mankiw (2010), economic growth is one of the reasons why advanced countries have become richer and have improved standards of living. Economic growth has also attracted attention because of the positive impact it has on society, as it has been associated with benefits such as increased wealth and standards of living among others. However, economic growth has also had negative impacts on society. This premise shall discuss both the

Climate Change

In 1972, the MIT team referred only in passing to the potential impacts of global climate change, concentrating mostly on the local warming effects from burning fossil fuels. Forty years later, climate change is recognized as one of the pre-eminent environmental threats in the world.

Though economic growth is measured in dollars; the industrial growth which is necessary for economic development creates enormous amounts of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. In 2015, carbon dioxide levels hit 400 parts per million (ppm). The last time levels were this high was more than a million years ago. Humans are pumping carbon into the atmosphere at a rate higher than any point in the last 66 million years - and the effects are being felt. 2015 was the warmest year on record and the first year that temperatures rose 10C above pre-industrial levels.

2. Biodiversity Loss

The term ‘biodiversity’ - meaning the diversity of plants and animals on the planet - was first used in a publication by biologist E O Wilson in 1988. & he concluded that the extinction rate for the world’s species was at that time already “about 1,000 to 10,000 times more than before human intervention”. The diversity of vertebrates - which includes mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish - declined by 52% in the four decades since Limits to Growth was published, according to conservation organization WWF (World Wildlife