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Deforestation: Here's What You Need To Know About The Warming Planet, How It's Affecting Us, and What's at Stake
Deforestation: Here's What You Need To Know About The Warming Planet, How It's Affecting Us, and What's at Stake
Here's what you need to know about the warming planet, how it's affecting
us, and what's at stake.
Deforestation is clearing Earth's forests on a massive scale, often resulting in damage to the quality of the land.
Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but swaths the size of Panama are lost each and every
year.
The world’s rain forests could completely vanish in a hundred years at the current rate of deforestation.
Forests are cut down for many reasons, but most of them are related to money or to people’s need to provide for their
families.The biggest driver of deforestation is agriculture. Farmers cut forests to provide more room for planting crops
or grazing livestock. Often many small farmers will each clear a few acres to feed their families by cutting down trees
and burning them in a process known as “slash and burn” agriculture.
Logging operations, which provide the world’s wood and paper products, also cut countless trees each year. Loggers,
some of them acting illegally, also build roads to access more and more remote forests—which leads to further
deforestation. Forests are also cut as a result of growing urban sprawl.
Not all deforestation is intentional. Some is caused by a combination of human and natural factors like wildfires and
subsequent overgrazing, which may prevent the growth of young trees.
Deforestation has many negative effects on the environment. The most dramatic impact is a loss of habitat for
millions of species. Seventy percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests, and many cannot survive the
deforestation that destroys their homes.
Deforestation also drives climate change. Forest soils are moist, but without protection from sun-blocking tree cover
they quickly dry out. Trees also help perpetuate the water cycle by returning water vapor back into the atmosphere.
Without trees to fill these roles, many former forest lands can quickly become barren deserts.
Removing trees deprives the forest of portions of its canopy, which blocks the sun’s rays during the day and holds in
heat at night. This disruption leads to more extreme temperatures swings that can be harmful to plants and animals.
Trees also play a critical role in absorbing the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming. Fewer forests means
larger amounts of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere—and increased speed and severity of global warming.
The quickest solution to deforestation would be to simply stop cutting down trees. Though deforestation rates have
slowed a bit in recent years, financial realities make this unlikely to occur.
A more workable solution is to carefully manage forest resources by eliminating clear-cutting to make sure that forest
environments remain intact. The cutting that does occur should be balanced by the planting of enough young trees to
replace the older ones felled in any given forest. The number of new tree plantations is growing each year, but their
total still equals a tiny fraction of the Earth’s forested land.
Deforestation Effects, Causes, And Examples: Top
10 List
December 13, 2012 in Geology & Climate, Plants
Over half of the world’s forests have been destroyed in the last 10,000 or
so years — the majority of this loss has occurred in just the last 50 years,
occurring simultaneously with a massive increase in the human population.
The incredible scale of this loss has led to significant changes throughout
many parts of the world, and in recent years these changes have been
accelerating. These changes include: large-scale extinction events,
desertification, climatic changes, topsoil loss, flooding, famine, disease
outbreaks, and insect ‘plagues’ — among others.
Deforestation occurs primarily as a result of: agriculture, fuel use and
production (firewood, charcoal, etc), timber harvesting, pasture-clearing for
livestock animals, and expanding human settlements. And also, to a
degree, due to large scale war — throughout history fire has often been
used as a way to deprive enemy populations of necessary resources.
These deforested areas almost inevitably end up as wastelands via the
processes of soil erosion and desertification, if they aren’t reforested. Many
of the areas of the world that were deforested thousands of years ago
remain as severely degraded wastelands or deserts today.
Even the most efficient agricultural systems and practices inevitably lead to
nutrient loss unless supplemented with fertilizer brought in from elsewhere
— this nutrient-loss is especially pronounced with GMO (genetically
modified food) agriculture. And this, along with the soil erosion that
accompanies the loss of large vegetation, further contributes to the soil
erosion and desertification that seems to almost inevitably follow
deforestation in the long term.
2. Population Growth And Expansion
4. Easter Island
Based on current evidence, the island was likely settled by its current
Polynesian inhabitants around 1100 CE, give or take a few hundred years.
Owing to the island’s limited land area and relative isolation, large
ecological impacts began occurring soon after settlement (based on
archaeological evidence).
“A new style of art from this period shows people with exposed ribs and
distended bellies, indicative of malnutrition, and it is around this time that
many islanders moved to living in fortified caves and the first signs of
warfare and cannibalism appear. Soil erosion because of lack of trees is
apparent in some places. Sediment samples document that up to half of
the native plants had become extinct and that the vegetation of the island
drastically altered. Polynesians were primarily farmers, not fishermen, and
their diet consisted mainly of cultivated staples such as taro root, sweet
potato, yams, cassava, and bananas. With no trees to protect them, sea
spray led to crop failures exacerbated by a sudden reduction in fresh water
flows. There is evidence that the islanders took to planting crops in caves
beneath collapsed ceilings and covered the soil with rocks to reduce
evaporation. Cannibalism occurred on many Polynesian islands,
sometimes in times of plenty as well as famine. Its presence on Easter
Island (based on human remains associated with cooking sites, especially
in caves) is supported by oral histories.”
It’s currently estimated that the world is losing around 137 plant, animal and
insect species every day as a result of rainforest deforestation. That means
that around 50,000 species are going extinct every year currently.
6. Soil Erosion
As demand for food and resources increases with a growing population, the
land and soil is gradually depleted of its nutrients, and also increasingly
experiences erosion. “Regular clearing and plowing exhausted existing soil,
which eventually became infertile. Runoff from deforested hillsides
increased the amount of silt and impeded the flow of water into agricultural
areas. Eventually, due to the Mediterranean climate and the increased
depletion of soil nutrients from hundreds of years of harvesting, yields
diminished. Rainwater that had been locked into the soil through vegetation
and forests was now running off too quickly, with each raindrop unprotected
by plants or by a litter layer.”
While deforestation wasn’t the sole cause of the Roman Empire’s decline
and fall, when combined with its corollaries of: near-constant resource
based war, declining agricultural productivity, increasing rates of
disease/epidemics, rebellion, corruption, a large degree of urbanization,
and reliance on complex systems, it certainly played a part.
7. Atmospheric Change/Greenhouse Effect
“During the drought of the 1930s, without natural anchors to keep the soil in
place, it dried, turned to dust, and blew away with the prevailing winds. At
times, the clouds blackened the sky, reaching all the way to East Coast
cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. Much of the soil ended up
deposited in the Atlantic Ocean, carried by prevailing winds. These
immense dust storms — given names such as ‘black blizzards’ and ‘black
rollers’ — often reduced visibility to a few feet or less. The Dust Bowl
affected 100,000,000 acres, centered on the panhandles of Texas and
Oklahoma, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.”
Robert Frost had it right —
the woods are lovely, dark
and deep.
Climate change
When forests are cleared, they emit CO back into the atmosphere and put humanity on a dangerous collision course with the worst of climate change. Deforestation accounts for about 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans — comparable to the emissions from all of the cars and trucks on Earth combined.
Empty forests
More than half of all tropical protected areas may be “empty forests” — containing trees but few animals as a result of overexploitation and uncontrolled hunting. As a result, animal species are in danger of extinction, tree species lose important seed dispersal, and local people lose an important supply of protein.
CI’s solutions
For nearly three decades, CI has worked to ensure the
world’s most important forests are protected for future
generations. That work has helped to place nearly 40
million hectares (nearly 99 million acres) of forests under
protection. We also recognize, however, that protected
areas aren’t enough. The truth is that, under our current
economic framework, forests are worth more cut than
standing.
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© BENJAMIN DRUMMOND
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© WILL TURNER
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© CRISTINA MITTERMEIER
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© BENJAMIN DRUMMOND
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People need forests. That’s where you come in. When you protect an acre of forest for $25, you’ll help create a healthier, more prosperous, more productive planet, for you and for everyone.
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