Environment: Ca' Foscari study, human impact since 3,000 years
Venice - Mankind has influenced environmental and climate dynamics for 3,000 years. This was claimed by a team of scientists from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice and the Institute for the Dynamics of Environmental Processes of the CNR (IDPA-CNR) who examined polar ice caps, alpine and Himalayan glaciers and lake beds in Asia, the Americas, Europe, Oceania and Africa. After five years spent travelling around the world researching the effects of human activity on the environment, paleoclimatologist Carlo Barbante, a Professor at Ca' Foscari University, director of IDPA-CNR and leader of the recently concluded ERC Early Human Impact project, said that "according to our data, humans may have had a significant impact on the environment in the last 3,000 years, when vast areas of our planet were burned to make room for settlements and agriculture." This discovery adds fuel to the debate on the beginning of Anthropocene, which until now was just a theory and generally linked to the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, instead, dated the beginning of Anthropocene to 7,000 years ago, attributing an abnormal increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to human activity. Barbante's team rejected this hypothesis, demonstrating that the increase in carbon dioxide that occurred around 7,000 years ago is not to be attributed to man, but to natural causes. A few millennia later there was a different impact, when a growing number of fires was recorded in both hemispheres of the globe causing considerable environmental and climatic changes on a large scale. "This had a huge, and in many cases irreversible, impact on the environment. These were most likely the triggering events that led our species to lay the foundations for those unquestionable climate changes that today seem so obvious to us," explains Professor Barbato.