Yet, in Southeast Asia the green revolution is faltering in part because it is no longer possible to plant two or three crops per year. In some cases, water flow, due to rapid runoff, is deeper than. In Cambodia, fish yields of swamp forests can be 10 times higher than some of the best fishing grounds in the Atlantic. One strain of annual corn recently discovered in Mexican forests would revolutionize corn production by eliminating the need to plow and replant. Essential for safe, reliable water supplies, forest cover also influences ground temperature, soil mixture and rainfall, regional weather patterns and global climate.
Floods and erosion will cause severe constraints on food production throughout the world before the end of the century by eroding topsoil, flooding rice fields, and filling in irrigation canals. Energy production has been reduced from many reservoirs because of siltation. For example the energy produced by the Mangla Reservoir Dam in Pakistan is reduced because of million tons of silt each year, four-fifths coming from the deforested Jhelum River watershed.
In Thailand, waterways that once provided energy efficient transportation are choked with silt and no longer navigable. Vincristine, made from a rainforest plant, now allows a child with leukemia an 80 percent chance of remission as compared with 20 percent in Tropical forests offer hope for other anti-cancer drugs, compounds for coronary disorders, and safer contraceptives.
The major cause of deforestation in the tropics is the need for food, fuel, shelter, and foreign exchange. The problems of converting forest areas for agriculture, fuelwood, and industrial logging are clues to more fundamental factors - problems of population pressure, unemployment, and inequitable land tenure. Little can be done to slow global population growth for the next 50 to 70 years, by which time 12 to 16 billion people will inhabit the earth.
In tropical countries, by the year , more than million people will be born annually. Land ownership is tremendously inequitable in developing countries. In Latin America, 7 percent of the landowners own 93 percent of the arable land as compared to the U. During the last quarter of this century, annual, global wood needs are expected to double to just over 3 billion cubic meters.
During the same period, demand for pulp is expected to increase from million cubic meters to over million cubic meters. Although tropical forests comprise 55 percent of global forest stocks, they contribute only 15 percent of the world trade in forest products.
The Congo and Finland have land and forest areas roughly equivalent in size, yet in Finland exported forest products valued 60 times more. Amazonian countries have nearly three times more forest per person than the world average yet import more forest products by value than they export. Tropical wood exports are the fifth largest export earner, excluding oil, amounting to 4 percent of all exports from the developing world.
The demand for tropical hardwood in developed countries has increased by percent since while in tropical regions it has only doubled.
Eighty percent of all wood harvested in the tropics is used for firewood and charcoal. For some 2 billion people in developing countries 80 percent of all households , it costs nearly as much to heat their cooking bowls as to fill them.
Pressure on the forest will only mount while petroleum prices remain high and populations grow. In parts of Latin America and West Africa, the urban poor often spend a quarter of their income on wood or charcoal for cooking. In Kwemzitu, Tanzania, Anne and Patrick Fleuret report that a woman with a household of five must gather To keep pace with this consumption level villagers would need to plant trees every year.
Small seminomadic groups of slash-and-burn agriculturalists in very large tracts of forest are probably beneficial to forest ecology. Small clearings open space, allow new growth and provide food for animals. However, population pressure has caused the number of shifting cultivators to become so numerous that normal fallow cycles are shortened.
Douglas Shane, in a report on deforestation in Latin America for the U. State Department, writes "cattle ranching is probably the single largest cause of deforestation in Latin America and to a large degree in Africa.
Ninety percent of Latin America's beef exports come to the U. It has been estimated that for every million and a half pounds of beef exported, some 75, acres of rainforest are cleared. Originally planned to accommodate one steer per hectare, the pastures quickly deteriorate to one per 3 to 10 hectares.
Since the consumption of beef in Central and South America has declined by Tropical forests are increasingly destroyed by land-seeking rural poor. There are more than million rural poor in the world without land or secure access to it, including some 85 percent of the households in Java and 70 percent in Brazil.
Usually the poor migrate on their own; occasionally they are sponsored by government projects. The most known consequence of deforestation is its threat to biodiversity. In fact, forests represent some of the most veritable hubs of biodiversity. From mammals to birds, insects, amphibians or plants, the forest is home to many rare and fragile species. By destroying the forests, human activities are putting entire ecosystems in danger, creating natural imbalances, and putting Life at threat.
The natural world is complex, interconnected, and made of thousands of inter-dependencies and among other functions, trees provide shade and colder temperatures for animals and smaller trees or vegetation which may not survive with the heat of direct sunlight. Besides, trees also feeding animals with their fruits while providing them with food and shelter they need to survive. Then you should find out some examples of how Life is interconnected:.
Healthy forests support the livelihoods of 1. This means there are many people depending on forests for survival and using them to hunt and gather raw products for their small-scale agriculture processes. But in developing countries such as Borneo, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil, or Mexico, land tenure systems are weak. Locals then have to make one of two choices. Or they can stay and work for the companies exploring it in remote plantations — often getting unfair wages and working under inhumane conditions.
Related: Is Avocado Production Sustainable? In the long term, the lack of healthy, nutritious soil can lead to low yields and food insecurity. Deforestation weakens and degrades the soi l. Forested soils are usually not only richer on organic matter, but also more resistant to erosion, bad weather, and extreme weather events. This happens mainly because roots help fix trees in the ground and the sun-blocking tree cover helps the soil to slowly dry out. As a result, deforestation will probably mean the soil will become increasingly fragile, leaving the area more vulnerable to natural disasters such as landslides and floods.
Deforestation also has a very strong contribution to climate change. If we speak about tropical forests, they hold more than gigatons of carbon, according to WWF. Both these effects negatively contribute to the greenhouse effect and to climate change. To understand the challenges of deforestation, check this National Geographic video. Around the world, deforestation occurs mostly in the tropics where there are different types of forests are: from wet and hot rainforests to others that lose their leaves in the dry season and become woodlands.
Some parts of the world have managed to protect their forests from deforestation while others have seen their forestal area decline. These changes significantly differ but there are 3 important worldwide examples of deforestation: the Amazon rainforest, Indonesia and Borneo, and Africa. Brazil and the Amazon forest are also important for the wrong reasons deforestation areas worldwide. Before , large industrial projects such as dams, roads, or mines were the main causes of deforestation in the Amazon region, together with subsistence farming.
However, for around thirty years, the causes of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest are changing. The development of intensive livestock production, combined with meat consumption increases in developed countries, is thus the main cause of deforestation in the Amazon forest.
Indonesia and the island of Borneo are emblematic symbols of the global phenomenon of deforestation. This region in Southeast Asia is naturally one of the richest reserves of forest and biodiversity in the world.
But at the same time, it is also one of the regions that have been suffering the most deforestation in recent decades. According to FAO , between and alone, Indonesia lost about 9 million hectares of its forests, largely due to deforestation caused by palm oil. One of the most important causes of deforestation in Indonesia and Borneo is unquestionably the production of palm oil.
According to FAO, between and , nearly 6 million hectares of palm oil plantations have gradually replaced Indonesian forests. This makes the palm oil industry one of the biggest contributors to deforestation in Southeast Asia — and it is expected to continue to be so. Certifications are starting to appear, including sustainable palm oil labels that aim to prove it comes from certified forests and workers are fairly paid like RSPO. Despite industries still posing serious environmental problems, the media spotlight on this topic is beginning to shift the lines.
Africa is also a large area suffering from deforestation. In fact, it experiences more deforestation than Asia: about 2 million hectares of forest disappear each year in Africa. Woodcutting of forest reserves and the development of cocoa and palm oil plantations are among the main causes of deforestation in Africa, together with land cleaning for mining activities.
Unconventional production practices that illegally take down trees and use dangerous chemicals threaten forests and wildlife. In this way, exploiting crops such as palm oil, wood, coffee or avocados has side effects that affect the environment and the surrounding ecosystems.
Some of the animals under greatest threat are:. How can we stop deforestation? According to OECD , the human population is expected to continue to increase and reach over 9 billion people by Join Us. Jessie Nagel is a communications specialist who brings decades of experience along with a passion for the environment, sustainability, and the arts, to her work as Chief Strategist with Amazon Aid Foundation.
Nagel is the co-founder of communications agency Hype, which offers public relations, marketing, and social media services to creative content providers in entertainment as well as select non-profit and independent business clients. She also helped develop and launch Green The Bid, an initiative aimed at shifting the production industry to zero-waste, carbon neutral, sustainable and regenerative practices, and is a founding member of the professional organization Women In Animation.
Nagel holds a B. Christina T Miller is a sustainable jewelry specialist who encourages leadership in positive social change and environmental protection. First trained as an artist, she brings creative problem solving to her work on gold supply chains, jewelry, and community organizing for Amazon Aid Foundation.
Miller is the founder and lead consultant of Christina T. Miller Sustainable Jewelry Consulting and provides strategy, guidance, and impact measurement services to clients including jewelry brands and not-for-profits. As co-founder and former director of Ethical Metalsmiths, Miller worked to create a community of individuals committed to responsible materials sourcing by raising awareness of problems needing attention and working to address them.
Susan Wheeler is a responsible jewelry advocate, she works to bring together people across the global jewelry supply chain to participate equally within the jewelry industry.
As founder of The Responsible Jewelry Transformative, she works on the mission of uniting and transforming the jewelry industry around responsible practices so that it may help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Susan works through education, initiatives and community. She brings to the Clean Gold Campaign a passion for collaboration and outreach. Susan is also a jewelry designer who uses her jewelry to highlight jewelry industry initiatives and positive narratives from miners and laborers whose work, community and environments are integral to her jewelry creation. Charlie has worked extensively at the intersection of environmental and social issues in Latin America.
In conjunction with his position at Amazon Aid, he is a Program Manager for the environmental health non-profit Pure Earth, where he leads a project in the Peruvian Amazon helping artisanal gold miners reduce mercury-use and restore degraded mining areas.
Through this work, Charlie traveled to Madre de Dios, Peru in February to assist with reforestation and learn firsthand about the challenges and marvels of the Amazon Basin. In his spare time, he enjoys writing, hiking and playing soccer. Born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, he is thrilled to be working at the local and global level to protect the diversity of the Amazon.
Luis E. Trained as a tropical ecologist, Luis is an expert on the environmental impacts of artisanal scale mining on tropical landscapes, particularly on the effects of mercury contamination on wildlife and indigenous communities.
Luis has led research efforts to study and address mining-related mercury contamination in Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Madagascar. His research focuses on improving understanding of the global mercury cycle, particularly emissions from the artisanal gold mining sector, and its regional and global effects on forests, ecosystems and human populations.
Silman is a Professor of Biology. His work centers on understanding biodiversity distribution and the response of forests ecosystems to past and future climate and land use changes. His current projects also address Andean and Amazonian carbon cycles and biodiversity controls for use in innovative, private- and public-sector, ecosystem services projects that change land use by generating revenue for conservation and creating economic and social value for local participants.
He has 20 years of experience in the Andes and Amazon and is coordinator and founding member of the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group. Miles has been a constant supporter since its inception and has assisted the organization with his expertise and knowledge of the Amazon. The work is focused on the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes and the adjacent Amazonian plain, with a particular emphasis in distributions along environmental gradients, be they in space or time, and includes both empirical work and modeling.
Thomas E. Lovejoy, a tropical biologist and conservation biologist, has worked in the Amazon of Brazil since He received his B. From to he directed the conservation program at World Wildlife Fund-U. From to , he served as chief biodiversity adviser to the President of the World Bank. Thomas Lovejoy developed the debt-for-nature swaps, in which environmental groups purchase shaky foreign debt on the secondary market at the market rate, which is considerably discounted, and then convert this debt at its face value into the local currency to purchase biologically sensitive tracts of land in the debtor nation for purposes of environmental protection.
In reality, no debt-for-nature swap occurs without the approval of the country in question. Thomas Lovejoy has also supported the Forests Now Declaration, which calls for new market-based mechanisms to protect tropical forests. Lovejoy played a central role in the establishment of conservation biology, by initiating the idea and planning with B. The proceedings, introduced conservation biology to the scientific community.
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