Wednesday, March 19, 2014

What is Deforestation?


By Shoryu Zaman-Das



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Put simply, deforestation is the constant cutting down of forests and large amount of trees in order to clear land for farming, and to find new sources of wood and paper. Deforestation has been the single major cause of tree loss, and since mankind learnt how to use an axe, more than half of the world's forests had disappeared, with a quarter of all the world's forests being cut down since 1950. There have been many attempts to stop deforestation by major international organisations, like the UN, but still, every year, a forest the size of Panama gets cut down. The Wageningen University have carried out their research, and have found that almost 80% of all trees are cut down for commercial plant growth, but what remains uncovered is deforestation for illegal causes, like land clearing for growth of Cocaine.

Deforestation is also one of the leading causes when it comes to global warming. Trees and plants, unlike all other life forms have a reversal process, where they breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen (not literally). Cutting down 16 million hectares of trees each year is not only destroying all the trees that are providing oxygen for us and our atmosphere, but almost all the plants which grew underneath the trees will die out too. This means that there is a rapid loss of global oxygen supply, which could be an extremely precious resource in the future if our carbon dioxide emissions continue.

Americans* use approximately 85 million tonnes of paper each year, which calculates to over 85 million trees just for America to use each year. Paper use is the most common cause of deforestation, with the world using over 300 million trees yearly to ensure a steady supply of paper for our schools, offices and businesses. Paper needs to be sourced from trees, which experts believe that worldwide, half the trees that were on this earth 8 000 years ago are now gone.

Farming is an important part of the worldwide economy, not only to grow food and crops, but to manufacture clothing. The demand for food, crops and clothing has rapidly increased, so has the need for farming. Land deemed fertile has been the home of forests, which is what many farmers want to get to. Even Brazil’s government is allowing local towns to go ahead with their plans to cut down parts of the Amazon rainforest in order to clear land.

One of the most popular ways of cutting down trees is the infamous "Slash and Burn" method. This involves burning trees to remove them from the area, before they are easily cut down. Obviously, this is harmful for the environment as lots of smoke would enter the atmosphere. Not only this, but additional carbon dioxide stored in leaves escape as a result of the burning. 

At least there is hope. The trees in the USA have been increasing in number since the 1920’s, and doesn’t look like stopping.  This is through many community growing schemes, where an estimated 1.5 million trees are planted every year. There are trees growing more in our environment, and our greater knowledge of different trees can help us plan for the future. Also, the rise of technology has taken away our need for large expenses for paper. By digitalisation, we have deserted the need for many forms of print. Deserting the need for print is distorting the need to cut down multiple trees daily.

You should now have a good awareness of deforestation, and the major problems that it causes. Following this article, you will read a few more posts, detailing what problems our earth is going to face if we continue deforesting at the current rate. Hopefully, after more worldwide recognition, we can make deforestation a problem of the past.

*The source of most statistics
 
 
 

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