1 Global environmental change

Global environmental change is a relatively new discipline of environmental science. It is concerned with the impacts of large-scale phenomena on our environment. This includes plants, animals, soils and the atmosphere. We already know that climate change is having a severe impact on the natural environment. For example, the European Environment Agency shows that water temperatures in selected European rivers and lakes are increasing. This has important implications for the animals and plants that live in them.

Climate change is obviously one of the key changes that our planet is currently facing, but climate change affects the whole planet and will take many years to progress, so it will not happen in isolation; there are many other changes, at small and large scales, that will happen at the same time. Other global change phenomena that may interact with climate change include habitat destruction and pollution of the air and of water.

It is hard enough to predict what will happen under climate change alone, but it becomes even more complicated when we begin to consider what might happen when other things are changing in parallel.