Part 6: Get to Know Earth Like You Never Have Before

The food that people produce to eat and sell depends on where they live. They grow fruit and other crops on fertile ground, graze their animals in less accessible areas, and fish where warm currents make sea life plentiful. But to feed the world's rising population, the UN says food production must increase by 70% before 2050. Brazil produces one-third of the world's coffee supply, nearly twice as much as the second biggest producer, Vietnam. Out of all the crops, though, wheat is grown on more land than any other. Russia supplied 18% of the world's exports in 2019. Egypt grows its own wheat but still imports some 13 million tons per year. China is the world's leading producer of tea, with about 40% of the global total. Turkey has the strongest thirst for tea, with everyone drinking between 5 and 10 cups a day, with 4 million people and more than 31 million sheep. It is not surprising that New Zealand exports 90% of the meat produced there. China imported over 50% of its sheep meat from New Zealand in 2019, making it a New Zealand's best customer. Food and the energy it contains is the fuel for our bodies. Overeating and unhealthy diets can lead to obesity, when a person gains so much weight that it can cause illness and disease. While in 2019, there were 690 million undernourished people in the world, that is 8.9% of the total population. Malnutrition causes the death of 3.1 million children each year. One-third of the world's malnourished children live in India. The average daily intake in India is 2360 kilocalories, while larger portions and cheap high-calorie, high-fat fast foods and ready meals have helped raise average daily intake levels in the United States to 3,800 kilocalories. Adult obesity is now about 39.6%. While in the UK, obesity is estimated to add an extra 8.2 billion dollars each year to the country's national healthcare costs. While Cuba is not a particularly rich country, its citizens are well fed with a daily intake of about 3,420 kilocalories. Literacy, being able to read and write, is an essential life skill. Being literate makes it easier for people to learn, make the most of their abilities and get better jobs. High levels of illiteracy make it difficult for nations to develop and become wealthier. In developing countries, 200 million people aged 15 to 24 have not completed primary school. About 61 million primary-aged children worldwide are receiving no schooling in 2014. More than half were in sub-Sahara Africa. Of the 781 million illiterate adults around the world, in 2010, nearly two-thirds were women. In some countries, girls are discouraged from attending school, leading to wide differences in literacy rates between men and women. In Georgia, there is an extremely high literacy rate at over 99%. In Russia, there is a high literacy rate as well at 99.7%. In Indonesia, about 88% of children attend secondary school. Literacy rate is about 95.6%. In contrast, Canada has about 16% of its citizens struggling to pass the basic literacy test. In the U.S., about 21% of adults are classed as functionally illiterate. Although most countries in Europe have very high literacy rates, more than 55 million adults classed as literate still lack basic reading and writing skills. Industrial waste and radiation leaks from nuclear power stations cause harm to people and the environment. Radioactive waste from nuclear reactors can remain dangerous for 240,000 years, longer than modern humans have existed. The 1991 Gulf War oil slick was up to 5 inches or 13 centimeters thick. Carbon dioxide gas produced by transportation and industry is adding to global warming. Chemical weapons were made in Dzerzhinsk, Russia, until 1998. The town's water contains extreme levels of toxic chemicals. Average life expectancy for the area in 2007 was 45. Sumgait in Azerbaijan was once home to chemical plants that released 120,000 tons of toxic chemicals per year. Cancer rates are up to 51% higher than elsewhere in the country. In 1984, poisonous gas escaped from a pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, killing 4,000 to 15,000 people. Thousands continue to suffer and die from illnesses related to the accident. In central Kalimantan, Indonesia, toxic mercury is used to extract gold from mines, with about 50 tons of mercury released into the air each year. As living standards improve worldwide and cities grow, so does the amount of garbage that people produce. Most waste goes to garbage dumps, which are expensive, use up a lot of land, and are harmful to the environment. Recycling is one way of helping to stop the global garbage heap from growing any bigger. Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to burn a lightbulb for almost 4 hours, or a television for 3 hours. A plastic bottle in landfill can take 450 years to biodegrade or rot. A lot of discarded litter ends up in rivers which take it to the sea, where circular currents called gyres collected into vast patches in the ocean surface waters. The patch in the Western Pacific is the largest of these oceanic rubbish dumps. Currently, Greenland produces 30% more waste than it can process, though two garbage-to-energy incinerators were opened in 2021 and 2022. Moldova dumps more than 1 million tons of waste into the ground each year, with only 10% of this being sorted and recycled. In 2019, only 12% of Australian household plastic was recycled, but the next year, the government announced a $190 million budget for new recycling infrastructure. The tap in your home may give you an instant supply of clean drinking water. However, millions of people around the world must get their water from a standpipe or a well. For one in three people, their sources of water are contaminated and unsafe to drink. The UN says each person should have 13 gallons or 50 liters of clean water every day. However, in developing countries, 70% of industrial waste is dumped untreated into rivers, where it pollutes usable water. In the US, a family of four uses about 400 gallons of water each day. Most of it is used for bathing and flushing the toilet. Mauritania has a dry desert climate. Only 68% of its population has clean water, and people often have to walk a long way to collect it. While 19% of the world's population without clean water access live in India. About 850 children here under the age of 5 die every day from diarrhea. Many water supplies in Indonesia are polluted by waste from factories and by sewage. About 70% of people here lack clean water. More than four-fifths of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, and coal. These are the remains of plants and other life forms, buried for millions of years. When burned, they release energy but also waste gases, which pollutes the atmosphere. Most fossil fuels were formed 300 to 360 million years ago. From the late 2nd century CE, the Romans in Britain mined coal on a large scale to heat houses through the underfloor pipes. Today, the US is the world's largest producer of gas. Texas provides almost one-quarter of the US gas from both onshore and offshore fields. Americans consume about 16% of the world's fossil fuel energy. While Venezuela has possibly the greatest amount of oil of any single country, over 17% of global reserves are found here. While the Gawar oil field in Saudi Arabia produces more oil than any other single oil field, contributing more than half of Saudi Arabia's vast oil production since 1938. And China is the largest producer of coal in the world, though it has the fourth largest coal reserves. While Russia has the world's largest natural gas reserves and second largest coal reserves, three times as much gas is consumed in Russia as coal. Burning fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas creates a lot of pollution. People are developing alternative cleaner energy sources, and some are renewable. They never run out. Iceland is a volcanic island. Currently, about 90% of all of its households are heated by geothermal power, while hydroelectric power plants supply 90% of Norway's energy. The US is the world's top producer of geothermal, biofuel, and nuclear energy, in second place for wind and solar, and third for hydroelectricity. While China is first in the world for wind, hydroelectricity, and solar, second for nuclear, and fifth for biofuel. Earth's climate has been warming and cooling for millions of years, but in the last century, the planet has been warming rapidly. Scientists widely accept that this warming is linked with carbon dioxide and other gases released by human industry, transportation, and other activities. The gases trap outgoing heat in Earth's atmosphere, warming the planet. All seven of the years from 2014 to 2020 rank as the warmest years since 1880 when records began. In an average summer, ice melts on about 20% of the surface of Greenland's ice sheet. At one point in the summer of 2012, scientists observed that 97% of the surface was melting. Glacier National Park in Montana now has only 25 glaciers. In 1910, there were 150. The entire Arctic region has warmed more during the past decades than any other part of the world, and the most obvious effect is on the sea ice. Sea ice is a layer of frozen seawater, typically 9 feet or 3 meters thick, which forms on the surface of the polar oceans. In 2020, Arctic sea ice fell to its second lowest extent since satellites started monitoring it. And since 1960, Lake Chad in Africa has shrunk by 90% because the pattern of monsoon rainfall has shifted, giving it less rain. With less rain, further crops, people have also taken much more of the lake's water, shrinking it further. Scientists think the rainfall shift could have been triggered by warming of the surface of the oceans. The wilderness is the last place that has been largely unchanged by humans. Indigenous people sometimes live in these undeveloped areas, where their lifestyles sometimes impact little on the landscape and wildlife. About 50% of the world's people live on just 1% of the land, at 508 miles or 817 kilometers from the North Pole. Alert Canada is the Earth's most northerly permanently inhabited place. Other protected wilderness areas include the Northeast Greenland National Park, which once was the world's largest protected area, mostly made up of the Greenland ice sheet. The Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, United States, was the first national park in the world. Founded in 1872, the large alpine meadows and grass prairies provide the ideal habitat for the large herds of bison living in the park. The Tibetan Plateau is remote and sparsely populated. From the most remote point, it is a three-week trip to the nearest cities of Lhasa or Korla, one day by car and the remaining 20 on foot.