What Is Deforestation
Deforestation is the reduction in forest areas across the world in which the cut-down areas are used for many other things such as agricultural croplands, urbanization, or mining activities. Greatly accelerated by human activities since 1960, deforestation has been negatively affecting natural ecosystems, biodiversity, and the climate. Deforestation affects the people and animals where trees are cut, as well as the larger world. Some 250 million people living in forest and savannah areas depend on forests for subsistence and income — many of them among the world’s rural poor.
Causes and Effects of Deforestation
Some of the main causes of deforestation are agricultural expansion, wood extraction, infrastructure expansion, poverty, and cattle ranching.
Causes:
- Agricultural Expansion: Industrial agriculture, along with subsistence agriculture, is the most significant driver of deforestation in tropical and subtropical countries, accounting for 80% of deforestation from 2000–2010. The current contribution of agriculture to deforestation varies by region, with industrial agriculture being responsible for 30% of deforestation in Africa and Asia, but close to 70% in Latin America.
- Wood Extraction: Wood harvesting encompasses felling, extraction, on-site/landing processing, and loading of trees, logs, or other tree parts onto trucks. Harvesting has a lasting impact on forest structure and ecosystem functioning.
- Infrastructure Expansion: With constant population growth and migration creating housing demand, new houses are built. There is an ongoing and never-ending need for wood to build houses and furniture. Wood comes from trees, resulting in millions of trees being cut down each day, resulting in a reduction of 7 billion trees each year. That’s not it!!!
- Poverty: Even without logging companies, deforestation and poverty are locked in a harmful relationship. Of the 1.3 billion people worldwide who live in extreme poverty on less than $1.25 a day, forests directly contribute to 90 percent of their livelihoods. To survive, some of these people clear the land for subsistence agriculture, chopping down even protected forests to grow food for their families. Others cut down trees for illegal timber, which sells for a fraction of the wood’s true value. The pittance they earn from these harmful endeavors keeps them mired in extreme poverty.
- Cattle Ranching: Cattle ranching is the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazon country, accounting for 80% of current deforestation rates. Brazil is home to approximately 200 million head of cattle, and is the largest beef, leather, soy, oil, gas, and mineral exporter in the world, supplying about one-quarter of the global market. Low input cost and easy transportation in rural areas make ranching an attractive economic activity in the forest frontier; low yields and cheap land encourage expansion and deforestation. Approximately 450,000 square kilometers of deforested Amazon in Brazil are now in cattle pastures. Cattle ranching and soy cultivation are often linked as soy replaces cattle pasture, pushing farmers farther into the Amazon.
Effects:
- Agricultural Expansion: The most significant agricultural drivers of deforestation include soy, palm oil, corn, and cattle ranching. The majority of industrial agriculture activities affecting forestland typically take place in developing countries that produce commodities for global markets. In the past, research had identified the expansion of rural populations as the key driver of deforestation due to small-scale agriculture, but recent studies have shown the growth of urban centers and global commodity markets are stronger drivers of deforestation today. For instance, in the rainforests of the Congo basin and Africa, traditional agriculture is the most common form of agricultural land use, although commercial agriculture of crops such as palm oil is growing.
- Wood Extraction: In some places, wood fuel harvesting can contribute to forest degradation and have negative impacts on forest health and biodiversity. This is due to chronic removal of small trees or branches over time, including removal of habitat for cavity-dwelling animals and saproxylic species (those that rely on dead wood for survival), and disruption of nutrient recycling processes.
- Infrastructure Expansion: The expansion of road networks in ecologically sensitive areas like the Amazon Basin or the Indo-Malayan tropical forests of Southeast Asia has increased deforestation. One study showed that 94.9 percent of deforestation occurs within 5 km of a road or navigable river. Transportation networks also facilitate deforestation and forest degradation by increasing access to more remote areas and allowing for less costly harvesting or clearing of forestland. Some studies suggest that the indirect impacts of logging on forest health may be greater than the direct logging of forests, due to the increased populations that accompany road expansion from logging operations. The expansion of rural communities facilitates the conversion of logged forestland or standing stock into pastures, croplands, or shifting cultivation fields, as the cost of migration to remote areas is reduced. Increased access to markets also creates incentives to engage in commercial agriculture or forestry.
- Poverty: “Deforestation and poverty are very closely linked,” said Clémentine Lalande, Haiti head of investments for Yunus Social Business. “It has been clearly identified in various studies as one of the main causes of poverty here, leading to degraded soil, decreasing agricultural yields, water scarcity, decreasing farming income, and potentially malnutrition, in particular in rural areas.”
- Cattle Ranching: Cattle ranching in the Amazon region is a low yield activity, where densities often average just one cattle per hectare. Most lands in cattle operations in the Brazilian Amazon are medium and large size ranches, with averages of several hundreds of hectares and many ranches reaching thousands of hectares. Amazon cattle are rarely supplemented with additional protein, and grass needs to be burned every few years to resprout. Fires set to replenish soils and clear brush for new pasture blanket the skies of the Amazon in the dry season. Because cattle use energy to convert grass into protein, several times the amount of land is needed to produce an equal amount of beef as poultry, and about 10 times the amount of land than needed to produce grain. In Brazil, pasture land outweighs planted cropland by about 5 times.
Why Should We Care
- We should care because our world is falling into the hands of international corporations who have just one goal, to make money. Our rainforests are falling apart, so fast, leaving no time/room for correction. Every day deforestation occurs, we lose 137 different plant and animal species.
- We should care because it affects our future. No trees mean no oxygen, only carbon dioxide. All living things on earth like humans, animals, plants would die without oxygen. The climate would get hotter. Every day this problem gets worse. Soon it will be difficult to sustain a healthy life cycle on earth.
- We should care because all species on the planet have a right to exist and play a vital role in the earth’s natural bio cycle. We as humans should not decide what lives take priority. Yet we do it anyway, not realizing the implications these losses cause not only on other species but on the human population as well. The cycle of extinction, especially of major megafauna begins with the larger animals and cascades down onto smaller species of animals, plants, and other organisms. We as humans depend on some of these smaller species as well as the larger umbrella species. This loss of species, the loss of habitat, and the following loss of biodiversity can cause a feedback loop when the species we rely on no longer exist.
- We should care because many of the products that humans rely upon come from different plant species. Medicine and other pharmaceuticals are one example. Around 74 percent come from plants, 18 percent from fungi, 5 percent from bacteria, and 3 percent from vertebrate species such as snakes or frogs. With these plants being destroyed, many of our medicinal needs are also being hampered, as synthetic products of certain medications have not, cannot, or are too costly to reproduce.
To sum everything up, deforestation plays a big role in our daily lives. The importance of forests cannot be underestimated. We depend on forests for our survival, from the air we breathe to the wood we use. Besides providing habitats for animals and livelihoods for humans, forests also offer watershed protection, prevent soil erosion, and relieve climate change. Yet, despite our dependence on forests, we are still allowing them to disappear.
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