Functions of the Environment
The environment performs certain vital functions, like sustaining life. It would be able to function properly as long as the demand for these functions is within its carrying capacity. The rising population in developing nations and the affluent consumption standards of the developed nations has placed a huge stress on the environment. Resources are becoming extinct and waste is being generated beyond the absorptive capacity. As a result, we are on the threshold of an environmental crisis. Due to the overuse of renewable resources, we are compelled to spend on research and technology to explore new alternatives. Added to this are the health costs of the degraded environment, which are higher than the benefits received. Thus, the expenditure on health is also rising. Global environmental issues like global warming and ozone depletion also add up to the financial commitments of the government. These problems are not new, but the problems have escalated due to increased industrialisation and urbanisation. The need of the hour is to take effective steps at both the individual level and at the level of the governments around the globe to combat climate change and to prevent the planet. A UN conference on climate change held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 resulted in an international agreement to fight global warming which called for reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases by industrialised nations.
Which of the following is not a function of environment?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → It exhausts the resources
The environment keeps life going by doing four jobs, its functions: it supplies resources, assimilates waste, sustains life through genetic and bio-diversity, and provides aesthetic services such as scenery. Exhausting resources is not one of them; it is what human over-use does to the environment, the very problem the passage describes.
Exhaustion happens to non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels, when they are extracted and used, and to renewable ones when they are used faster than they can regenerate.
Note: The passage is taken, in a shortened form, from the chapter ‘Environment and Sustainable Development’ of the NCERT book Indian Economic Development. Read that chapter thoroughly, boxes included: the functions of the environment, absorptive capacity, global warming and ozone depletion asked about in this set are all explained there.
NCERT (2025-26): “Functions of the Environment: The environment performs four vital functions (i) it supplies resources: resources here include both renewable and non-renewable resources. Renewable resources are those which can be used without the possibility of the resource becoming depleted or exhausted. … Non-renewable resources, on the other hand, are those which get exhausted with extraction and use, for example, fossil fuel (ii) it assimilates waste (iii) it sustains life by providing genetic and bio diversity and (iv) it also provides aesthetic services like scenery etc.…” |