Facilitating dialogue to promote open and multi-faceted discussion and awareness

Many of us think of deforestation as logging and the cutting down of some trees, surprisingly enough however, logging only contributes to 3% of the grave deforestation situation at hand. Actually, the greatest contributing factor to deforestation is cattle ranching, which accounts for 80% of the Amazons deforestation. So what is deforestation exactly?

Simply put, deforestation is the conversion of forested areas to non-forested areas. The culprit to deforestation is human settlement and development of land. For over a thousand years, we have been deforesting for farms and settlements using a method known as slash and burn. This method is pretty self-explanatory, but just in case, it is cutting down an areas vegetation and left to dry over a certain period so whatever is left over can be easily burned down. At the current rate of deforestation, the Amazon rainforest will be reduced by 40% in the next 2 decades.

The big deal is that the Amazon is an ecosystem that is crucially vital to the stability of the environment of the globe, producing 20% of the Earth’s oxygen. It is also a large source of fresh water. So much so that it’s collapse would affect global ocean currents, changing the climate and weather patterns of the globe. Also keep in mind that the Amazon, as a whole, stores about 10 times as much carbon as is currently emitted globally per year.

I understand that this might be a lot to soak in, so let’s take a break, and in part two of this report, I’ll discuss with you the how and why Amazonian deforestation in the past 50 years has boomed exponentially with the population of the Earth, as well as the political side of this international crisis.

~

References

mongabay.com (September 14, 2009). Social causes of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0914-fearnside_social_amazon.html

Fearnside, P. M. 2008. The roles and movements of actors in the deforestation of Brazilian Amazonia. Ecology and Society 13(1): 23. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol13/iss1/art23/

Turner, I.M. 2001. The ecology of trees in the tropical rain forest. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0521801834

Malhi, Yadvinder; Phillips, Oliver (2005). Tropical Forests & Global Atmospheric Change. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198567065.

www.wikipedia.com