Unveiling the roles of microbes in environmental management and sustainable economic development

Abstract

In spite of the environment producing everything it needs to ensure the survival and growth of its residents, man still continue to strive in ensuring that the natural environment becomes more suitable towards meeting up with his needs for survival. This has led to his engagement with series of manipulative activities such as agriculture, exploitation, exploration, innovations and urbanization that had left the environment with negative impacts. Attempts toward the mitigation of these impacts had led to the concept of Environmental Management and Economic Sustainability, whose principal aim is to ensure the needs of man are met but not at the expense of environmental damage. The ubiquitous and diverse nature of Microbes make them significant assets toward achieving sustainable development when used and exploited wisely. The scope of this paper is to explain the roles of microbes in agriculture, waste management, bioremediation, renewable energy production and climate change mitigation. In spite of these, more researches need to be done to have a better understanding on the interactions of microbes with the environment. Also, beneficial microbial processes should be built in industrial scale in order to fully achieve the benefits of microbial roles towards the actualization of environmental and economic sustainable development.