Ecological crisis

An ecological or environmental crisis occurs when changes to the environment of a species or population destabilizes its continued survival.

Some of the important causes include: The evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium sees infrequent ecological crises as a potential driver of rapid evolution.

Because of the impact of humans on the natural environment in the recent geological period, the term ecological crisis is often applied to environmental issues caused by human civilizations such as: the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and plastic pollution which have emerged as major global challenges during the first few decades of the 21st century.

The cold-water fish will eventually leave their natural geographical range to live in cooler waters by migrating to higher elevations.

[7] For instance, out of 4000 species analyzed by the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, half were found to have shifted their distribution to higher latitudes or elevations in response to climate change.

[9] For example, climate change can cause species to move in different directions, potentially disrupting their interactions with each other.

However, more intense climate change is still expected to increase the current extent of drylands on the Earth's continents.

[12] Mountains cover approximately 25 percent of the Earth's surface and provide a home to more than one-tenth of the global human population.

[33][34] Still, it is the general habitat destruction (often for expansion of agriculture), not climate change, that is currently the bigger driver of biodiversity loss.

These tend to be directly or indirectly connected to climate change and can cause a deterioration of forest ecosystems.

For example, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity aims to prevent biodiversity loss and to conserve wilderness areas.

In the absence of predators, animal species are bound by the resources they can find in their environment, but this does not necessarily control overpopulation.

In fact, an abundant supply of resources can produce a population boom that ends up with more individuals than the environment can support.

Predicated changes for Earth's biomes under two different climate change scenarios for 2081–2100. Top row is low emissions scenario, bottom row is high emissions scenario. Biomes are classified with Holdridge life zones system. A shift of 1 or 100% (darker colours) indicates that the region has fully moved into a completely different biome zone type. [ 1 ]
Summary of major environmental-change categories that cause biodiversity loss. The data is expressed as a percentage of human-driven change (in red) relative to baseline (blue), as of 2021. Red indicates the percentage of the category that is damaged, lost, or otherwise affected, whereas blue indicates the percentage that is intact, remaining, or otherwise unaffected. [ 18 ]