Discuss the relative importance of deforestation and its impact on the environment.
Discuss the relative importance of deforestation and its impact on the environment.
Deforestation is the long-term removal of trees from an area because of changes in land use, it can also happen by natural processes such as fires, disease and storms. The need for wood and land has increased, as a result so has deforestation. It is quite difficult to calculate how much forest is actually destroyed each year but approximations can be drawn. During the 1980’s it was estimated by “The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)” that tens of thousands of tropical forests were destroyed – 53000 to be precise. Form this estimation it is possible to say that an area great enough to cover North Carolina is cut down every year (1). The size of twenty football fields is lost in forest every sixty seconds (2). However deforestation does have advantages as well as disadvantages; these have various impacts on the planet we live on.
One of the main causes and advantages of deforestation is the ability to use the forests as raw material for furniture, paper, construction and fuel in the less developed countries (3). The forests are probably the main sources of our wood supplies and have been for a long time. Land is also cleared for agricultural uses; raising crops and grazing for animals, mainly cattle. This is essential for many people in less developed countries. Medicines have also been found in the forests, and have been a great provider of such for a long time. By clearing the forests we are able to find such products. From the forests 25% of medicines we use are obtained, according to the World Rainforest Movement (4).
The trees trap particles such as carbon which are created through pollution (4). They are trapped by a process called photosynthesis (5). By doing this the quality of air is vastly improved. Nitrogen and oxygen the two gasses of which the atmosphere is nearly entirely composed of does not retain the sun’s heat that is radiated down to us, but some gasses like carbon dioxide, ozone and methane do without these gasses the temperature of the earth world be a lot colder. However too much of these green house gasses means retaining too much infra – red radiation which causes the earth to warm up. Carbon dioxide is released in vast quantities when fossil fuels are burned, when the trees are disposed of, either by rotting or burning, the trapped particles are released, mainly the carbon in the form of CO . It is a known fact that CO gas plays an important part in increasing the greenhouse effect (2). 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions are a direct result of deforestation. The increasing amounts of these gases increase the rate of global warming which in turn gradually increases the climate temperature (6). This change in climate can and is causing problems for many species as they are not able to adapt fast enough to the ever changing climate. Deforestation may not be the only factor that increases global warming but it certainly does play a major role in it and we can see the affects of this in a recent report of Greenland’s glaciers. The rate at which these glaciers are travelling into the sea has increased. This acceleration is a direct sign of global warming. This results in the faster melting of sheets of ice which in turn means an increase in sea levels of up to six metres and this will almost certainly cause severe flooding and disruption to the environment (11).
