Global harvest

Annual Global Harvest of Crops and Crop Residues in the Mid-1990s (the First Column Is in Mt of Fresh Weight per Year All Other Figures Are in Mt of Dry Matter per Year)... 

If at least 37% of all nitrogen in today s global harvest comes from the Haber-Bosch synthesis, then a 10% reduction would lower this reliance to 33%. 

The Terrestrial Component. These papers illustrate the application of temporal, spatial, and domain connectivity. Chemicals associated with people, food eaten by people, insects, and other organisms that compete with people for food, and other biomass must be identified. Since most of these chemical groups are terrestrial, spatial boundaries such as urban, biome, regional, and global are used. From a system perspective, these boundaries exclude water and air and require that they be placed in the "rest of the system" category. This type of boundary introduces the assumption that food, competitors for food, or any chemical that is discharged to or harvested from the air or water is ignored or assumed to be external to the system studied. 

One of the most debated environmental issues of the past fifteen to twenty years has been the exploitation of the forests for wood for paper making. Approximately 30% of the earth s land surface is forested, and around half of this is harvested commercially for industrial purposes (Chapter 1). Over 80% of this wood for industrial use comes from the forests of North America, Europe and what was formerly the Soviet Union. Wood has been the primary fibre source for pulp and paper production world-wide for many years, and it is necessary to take a global view of its consumption. Wood consumption world-wide has more than doubled since 1950 from 1.5 billion to 3.5 billion m3 (United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation). Approximately half of this is used for fuelwood and half for industrial use. The principal driving force for this increase in consumption has been the increase in world population which shows a close correlation with wood consumption (Figure 10.1). 

Globally, it is estimated that there is 3870 million ha of forests (30 % of the Earth s land area), of which 95 % is natural or semi-natural (Table 1.1). At the present time, in most developed countries, the forest area is increasing and this is likely to continue given the present rates of harvesting. However, in tropical parts of the world, the forest area continues to decline, giving rise to serious concerns. It is estimated that between 1990 and 2000, there was a loss of 9.4 million ha per annum of forest worldwide (an annual deforestation rate of 14.6 million ha and an increase in forest area of 5.2 million ha per year Table 1.2). The only way to reverse this trend is to place sufficient economic value on forest resources, with incentives to encourage sustainable forest management. 

They think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior. Take the relationship between foraging and colony size. Harvester ants constantly adjust the number of ants actively foraging for food, based on a number of variables overall colony size (and thus mouths needed to be fed) amount of food stored in the nest amount of food available in the surrounding area even the presence of other colonies... 

The castor plant is widely considered to be a nuisance plant, because it proliferates rapidly in poor, depleted soils that cannot sustain other more important commercial crops. It spreads quickly as a weed, and in some places has been listed as an intrusive species to be eliminated [51, 52]. Nevertheless, in recent years the industrial volume of castor oil has increased dramatically, driven primarily by the global interest in renewable resources for fuel and feedstocks as an alternative to petrochemicals. The majority of the volume growth has come from the Asian continent, primarily from India, where the castor plant is harvested commercially [53]. In addition to its direct use in pol3mrethane products, the oil and its components have been the focus of innovative new derivatization strategies to improve their properties for use in plastics, while retaining high levels of renewable content in the final products. These developments will be described in Section 4.5. 

Overall, we will need to harvest nearly three times as much farm output in 2050 as we harvest today - and we re already farming half the global land area not under deserts or glaciers. Pest control will remain vital to both people and wildlife. 

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