Question

What is an environmental threshold?

Answer 1

Hint: The word “environment” is most often used to refer to the Earth. The interaction of all living organisms, habitat, weather, and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity is referred to as the environment.

Complete answer:
The environment threshold is the point at which a relatively minor change or disruption in environmental conditions causes the ecosystem to rapidly change. When an environmental threshold is crossed, the ecosystem's intrinsic resilience can no longer be able to restore it to its previous state. When an environmental threshold is crossed, the health of an ecosystem can change quickly. Environmental thresholds describe the non-linearity of environmental or biological systems' responses to stresses imposed by humans or natural processes.
The characteristics of environmental threshold are:
Thresholds may be classified as either points or regions crossing which the ecosystem cannot cope with environmental change and suddenly shifts from one state to another. Instead of a sudden change at a given moment, zone-type thresholds mean a gradual shift or transformation from one state to another. Environmental thresholds have gotten a lot of attention recently because many cases of catastrophic deterioration of conditions have proven difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
Environmental catastrophe is an example of a point at which no further action can be taken.
Hysteresis, or the dependency of a system's current state on its previous state, is a common feature of environmental thresholds. Even if the transition is not permanent, the path back to the original state from the altered state will be very different from the path that led to the altered state.

Note:
Some environmental thresholds, such as clear lakes becoming turbid, have been well known, but there are likely to be many more. Over a hundred examples can be found in the Resilience Alliance and Santa Fe Institute's thresholds database.