Sentences with phrase «irreversible changes in ecosystem»

Pauley and other marine biologists have shown that drastically reduced populations in marine fishes caused by overfishing may never recover because overfishing has created irreversible changes in ecosystem structure.

Not exact matches

The consequences of such initiative were disastrous: Protected from hunting for 35 years, and devoid of natural predators, the beavers grew over 5,000 times their initial population, caused irreversible changes in the forest ecosystem, and started advancing over the continent.

Ecosystem - based approaches provide an important route to sustainable action and represent a vital insurance policy against irreversible damage from climate change, whereas failure to acknowledge the relationship between climate change and biodiversity and failure to act swiftly and in an integrated manner could undermine efforts for improvements in both areas.

Knowledge of these thresholds is key to the sustainable management of ecosystems and to anticipating irreversible changes and / or ecological collapse,» wrote Alfredo Huete, a researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia, in an accompanying commentary on the study in Nature.

Between the poles of real - time catastrophe and nonevent lies the prevailing scientific view: Without big changes in emissions rates, global warming from the buildup of greenhouse gases is likely to lead to substantial, and largely irreversible, transformations of climate, ecosystems and coastlines later this century.

De Souza points out that the two - degree threshold is a «goal set out in recent international climate change negotiations, based on scientific and economic studies, to prevent irreversible damage to the planet's ecosystems and economy.

Extinction is an irreversible biological change that can fundamentally alter the ecosystem of which a lost species was a part, contributing to ecological state shifts as described in the last section and to depleting ecosystem services as described below (see Chapter 3, Boxes 3.1 and 3.2).

«With the global trade in shark fins pushing sharks toward extinction, it will take strong actions such as this to prevent us from making irreversible changes to our ocean ecosystems,» said Whit Sheard, senior advisor for Oceana, a maritime conservation organization.

* At higher projected rates of warming, areas such as the tundra and the Amazon rainforest face a high risk of «abrupt and irreversible» changes in their ecosystems.