Environmental Development Strategies for Clean Water Beyond the Shores

This book reveals mitigation strategies for coastal and marine water pollution from source to sink. Solutions are categorized based on the required energy levels, such as conventional, green, sustainable, restorative, reconciliatory, and regenerative. For the first time in the history of environmental science, environmental problems are assigned hypothetical energy levels. Keystone environmental problems such as human population increase, intensive farming, the global energy crisis, deforestation, air pollution, water pollution-scarcity, overexploitation of natural resources, and urbanization (industrialization, urban sprawl, and settlements) are considered very high energy problems, which resemble primary producers in the tropical food chain. And problems are also interconnected as cause and effect to establish a sequence; for instance, intensive farming causes agrochemical pollution, which leads to cultural eutrophication, and eutrophication causes biodiversity loss. And the energy dwindles down from the very high-energy keystone problem to the low-energy problem along the sequence. Thus, this phenomenon mimics reducing energy levels throughout each trophic level in the typical terrestrial food chain. Using these energy relationships, solutions are chosen. High-energy environmental problems such as keystone root problems are usually recommended with low-energy solutions such as regenerative, reconciliatory, and restorative solutions. And low energy problems (usually problems at the tail end of the sequence) are recommended with high-energy solutions such as conventional, green, and sustainable. Yet the study barely discourages applying high energy solution to high energy problem because in certain exceptional cases there won’t be any viable low energy alternative available to mitigate the issue, thus, study only recommends the implementation of low energy solutions for keystone and high energy problems. This method is applicable to any kind of environmental circumstance, regardless of social, economic, political, and cultural factors. Since this method is energy-based and non-human-centric, the human centric nature of environmental risk assessment techniques could be avoided.