Climate Change and Obesity.

Global warming and the rising prevalence of obesity are well described challenges of current mankind. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic arose as a new challenge. We here attempt to delineate their relationship with each other from our perspective. Global greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have exponentially increased since 1950. The main contributors to such greenhouse gas emissions are manufacturing and construction, transport, residential, commercial, agriculture, and land use change and forestry, combined with an increasing global population growth from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in 2020 along with rising obesity rates since the 1980s. The current Covid-19 pandemic has caused some decline in greenhouse gas emissions by limiting mobility globally via repetitive lockdowns. Following multiple lockdowns, there was further increase in obesity in wealthier populations, malnutrition from hunger in poor populations and death from severe infection with Covid-19 and its virus variants. There is a bidirectional relationship between adiposity and global warming. With rising atmospheric air temperatures, people typically will have less adaptive thermogenesis and become less physically active, while they are producing a higher carbon footprint. To reduce obesity rates, one should be willing to learn more about the environmental impact, how to minimize consumption of energy generating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, and to reduce food waste. Diets lower in meat such as a Mediterranean diet, have been estimated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 72%, land use by 58%, and energy consumption by 52%.

Measuring the impact of global tropospheric ozone, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide concentrations on biodiversity loss.

The aim of this study is to examine the impact of air pollutants, including mono-nitrogen oxides (NOx), nitrous oxide (N2O), sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on ecological footprint, habitat area, food supply, and biodiversity in a panel of thirty-four developed and developing countries, over the period of 1995-2014. The results reveal that NOx and SO2 emissions both have a negative relationship with ecological footprints, while N2O emission and real GDP per capita have a direct relationship with ecological footprints. NOx has a positive relationship with forest area, per capita food supply and biological diversity while CO2 emission and GHG emission have a negative impact on food production. N2O has a positive impact on forest area and biodiversity, while SO2 emissions have a negative relationship with them. SO2 emission has a direct relationship with per capita food production, while GDP per capita significantly affected per capita food production and food supply variability across countries. The overall results reveal that SO2, CO2, and GHG emissions affected potential habitat area, while SO2 and GHG emissions affected the biodiversity index. Trade liberalization policies considerably affected the potential habitat area and biological diversity in a panel of countries.