Ecosystems and Global Changes

Increasing population has led to the increasing demand for food, raw materials, and energy. Continuing land use changes, intensification of its exploitation, deforestation, fossil fuel combustion, and related carbon dioxide production have been contributing to change of water and energy balance of the globe, thus changing conditions for life. Other reasons for changing conditions on the Earth are natural changes in interactions between the Earth and outer space. Actual climate change is a part of other global changes resulting in both natural and anthropogenic changes. It is mostly felt as a change of global temperature and increase of precipitation intensities and totals. Flood periods are followed by long periods without precipitations. Increasing population as well as increasing consumption of resources lead to the increasing imbalance between our planet production and consumption. To preserve good conditions for population of the Earth, it is necessary to decrease consumption of energy, raw materials, and food to reach equilibrium between Earth´s ecosystem production and consumption of the ecosystem products.