Evaluate The Impact Of Deforestation In Indonesia.

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Katherine Smith

Evaluate The Impact Of Deforestation In Indonesia

Indonesia is an island republic and the largest nation in South East Asia, comprising of more than 13,670 islands straddling the equator, 6,000 of which are inhabited. Its latitude is 5º N to 10º S and longitude 95ºE to 140ºE, and stretches across 5,150 km of ocean. Indonesia is home to approximately 10% of the world’s remaining tropical forests. In December 1999 Indonesia had only 20 million hectares of forests left and the World Bank has said that Indonesian forests were reduced by an annual average of approximately 1.5 million hectares between 1985 and 1997. A number of factors cause this deforestation. These include the use of wood as fuel; the use of wood in the manufacture of paper; manufacture of other wood products; slash-and-burn farming; commercial farming; cattle ranching; infrastructure development; forest fires; population resettlement; insect pests and diseases; mining; pollution; and illegal logging.  These in turn are all results of unsustainable levels of consumption; the effects of national debt; pressure for increased trade and development; poverty; patterns of land ownership; growing populations; and social relationships including gender relations. These underlying causes are often ignored in explanations of why forests are being destroyed rather than managed sustainably. It is more usual to blame forest destruction on poor farmers rather than examine in any detail the effects of political and economic activities at the international level.

Deforestation not only affects the local area, but also has a global effect. On the small scale the trees which are cut down or burnt, protect the soil from rain or wind, which would otherwise blow it away. High temperatures and rainfall throughout the year encourage leaching of nutrients from the soil, so that few nutrients remain except for those held by the plants themselves. Once forests are cleared for agriculture, grazing, or logging, there is no guarantee that the trees can grow back on the impoverished soil. On the local scale, forest ecosystems recycle the rainwater back to the atmosphere through evaporation from the soil and leaf surfaces and through transpiration from plants, a process that is very efficient. Ecologists, who are studying the effects of deforestation on the recycling of rainfall, point out that in a healthy strand of rain forests, about half of the rainfall is evaporated from the surface of soils and leaves or transpired by plants. The other half runs into streams and river, eventfully returning to the ocean. With deforestation, this vigorous recycling of water will weaken and could lead to lower rainfall in the region. Forests assume an essential role on the global scale. The forest cover absorbs energy that would reflect back to the atmosphere if the soil were bare. Plants take up carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, and release carbon back to the atmosphere when they are burned or die and decompose. If forests were not cut down, the amount of carbon put into the atmosphere will equal the amount that the trees would take in. As more trees are cut and not replanted, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere will continue to build up. Researchers find that new forest plantations covering an area of approximately 465 million hectares would be required to remove the 2.9 billion tons of carbon (the amount of carbon accumulation in the atmosphere every year).

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There are many causes of deforestation.  Many development institutions and politicians regard population pressure as the major factor causing rainforest destruction.  However, the belief that this is the main cause of rainforest loss is used by many governments and businesses to imply that there is little or nothing they can do about the problem of rainforest destruction. In fact it is large companies and the unfairness of international trade, which are the root causes of rainforest destruction. For instance, millions of hectares of primary rainforests are being destroyed in South East Asia by logging, and the driving force in this ...

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