World Environment Day: 8 greatest threats humans have created

Rough estimates put world forest cover to 31 percent compared to land area while in 1950 it was 41 percent. Though the last decade saw a slow rise in forest cover due to planned afforestation moves, considering that the Amazon has lost around 17 per cent of its forest in the last year, deforestation also brings us to the notice of the biodiversity lost. Deforestation is considered to be the cause for 15 percent of all the greenhouse emissions. (Photo|AP)

World Wildlife Org stats says that one billion people cannot access fresh water while 2.4 billion don't have adequate sanitation facilities. Sound, air, water expose humans as well as other organisms to a threat to their existence and more over, it makes survival harder. (Photo|AP)

While physical structures are often considered totems of civilizations but the infrastructure we have mounted on earth are cutting through dense forests - thereby destroying bio diversities which has the same right and reason to exist as humans do, spilling oil on ocean floor - endangering marine life as well as polluting the shoreline. (Photo|AP)

Overfishing can pose serious social, economical issues as well as series threats to communities who has survived on that particular eco-system. As per WWF stats, more than 85 percent fisheries of the world have been moved beyond their natural biological limits.(Photo|AP)

Poaching for elephant tusks and tiger skins have endangered the lives of wild animals more anything. A recent Great Elephant Census says elephant killing in the past seven years saw African elephant numbers sinking by a third. In 2011, 23 metric tons of ivory was seized - the ivory comes from around 2,500 elephants. (Photo|AP)

Oil and gas development poses a more serious problem today because most of the easily accessible points have been explored already. Man is moving to more remote and delicate parts of the earth to dig up more hydrocarbons. Leaks, pipeline failures, accidents and rig explosions has killed people and causing mostly irreversible damage to marine life. (Photo|AP)

At our current rate of consumption and the rate of population increase, we should wonder how we are going to feed the 10 billion population in the future. The decade we crossed the 6 billion mark also marked the warmest year on record (1998). (Photo|AP)