Deforestation

Modern-Day Plague
Deforestation is clearing Earth's forests on a massive scale, often resulting in damage to the quality of the land.
Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but swaths the size of Panama are lost each and every
year.
The world’s rain forests could completely vanish in a hundred years at the current rate of deforestation.
Forests are cut down for many reasons, but most of them are related to money or to people’s need to provide for their
families.The biggest driver of deforestation is agriculture. Farmers cut forests to provide more room for planting crops
or grazing livestock. Often many small farmers will each clear a few acres to feed their families by cutting down trees
and burning them in a process known as “slash and burn” agriculture.
Logging operations, which provide the world’s wood and paper products, also cut countless trees each year. Loggers,
some of them acting illegally, also build roads to access more and more remote forests—which leads to further
deforestation. Forests are also cut as a result of growing urban sprawl.
Not all deforestation is intentional. Some is caused by a combination of human and natural factors like wildfires and
subsequent overgrazing, which may prevent the growth of young trees.
Deforestation has many negative effects on the environment. The most dramatic impact is a loss of habitat for
millions of species. Seventy percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests, and many cannot survive the
deforestation that destroys their homes.
Deforestation also drives climate change. Forest soils are moist, but without protection from sun-blocking tree cover
they quickly dry out. Trees also help perpetuate the water cycle by returning water vapor back into the atmosphere.
Without trees to fill these roles, many former forest lands can quickly become barren deserts.
Removing trees deprives the forest of portions of its canopy, which blocks the sun’s rays during the day and holds in
heat at night. This disruption leads to more extreme temperatures swings that can be harmful to plants and animals.
Trees also play a critical role in absorbing the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming. Fewer forests means
larger amounts of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere—and increased speed and severity of global warming.
The quickest solution to deforestation would be to simply stop cutting down trees. Though deforestation rates have
slowed a bit in recent years, financial realities make this unlikely to occur.
A more workable solution is to carefully manage forest resources by eliminating clear-cutting to make sure that forest
environments remain intact. The cutting that does occur should be balanced by the planting of enough young trees to
replace the older ones felled in any given forest. The number of new tree plantations is growing each year, but their
total still equals a tiny fraction of the Earth’s forested land.

Causes and Effects of Deforestation

Although humans have been practicing deforestation since ages, it was in the mid-1800s that forests
began to be destroyed at an unprecedented rate. As a matter of fact, throughout the earlier part of the
medieval age, Europeans used to live amongst vast areas of forested land. But later, they began
deforestation at such a high rate that they started to run out of wood for cooking and heating. Also, due to
the depletion of their natural habitat, wild game too began disappearing, which the Europeans largely
depended upon for their nutritional requirements. Today, parallels can clearly be observed in the
deforestation that is occurring in most developing countries.

One of the most worrying factors today is the massive destruction of the rainforests of the world, which is
affecting the biodiversity adversely, as well as being one of the major contributory factors of the Holocene
mass extinction that is ongoing.

What are the Causes of Deforestation?

The destruction of the forests is occurring due to various reasons, one of the main reasons being the
short term economic benefits. Given below are some more common causes of deforestation:

Used for Urban and Construction Purposes: The cutting down of trees for lumber that is used for
building materials, furniture, and paper products. Forests are also cleared in order to accommodate
expanding urban areas.

To Grow Crops: Forests are also cut down in order to clear land for growing crops.

To Create Grazing Land: Forests are cut down in order create land for grazing cattle.

Used for Fuel: Trees are cut down in developing countries to be used as firewood or turned into
charcoal, which are used for cooking and heating purposes.

Some of the other causes of deforestation are: clearing forests for oil and mining exploitation; to make
highways and roads; slash and burn farming techniques; wildfires; and acid rain.

What are the Effects of Deforestation?

There are a number of adverse effects of deforestation, such as:

Erosion of Soil: When forest areas are cleared, it results in exposing the soil to the sun, making it very
dry and eventually, infertile, due to volatile nutrients such as nitrogen being lost. In addition, when there is
rainfall, it washes away the rest of the nutrients, which flow with the rainwater into waterways. Because of
this, merely replanting trees may not help in solving the problems caused by deforestation, for by the time
the trees mature, the soil will be totally devoid of essential nutrients. Ultimately, cultivation in this land will
also become impossible, resulting in the land becoming useless. Large tracts of land will be rendered
permanently impoverished due to soil erosion.

Disruption of the Water Cycle: Trees contribute in a large way in maintaining the water cycle. They
draw up water via their roots, which is then released into the atmosphere. A large part of the water that
circulates in the ecosystem of rainforests, for instance, remains inside the plants. When these trees are
cut down it results in the climate getting drier in that area.

Loss of Biodiversity: The unique biodiversity of various geographical areas is being lost on a scale that
is quite unprecedented. Even though tropical rainforests make up just 6 percent of the surface area of the
Earth, about 80-90 percent of the entire species of the world exist here. Due to massive deforestation,
about 50 to 100 species of animals are being lost each day. The outcome of which is the extinction of
animals and plants on a massive scale. 

Flooding and Drought: One of the vital functions of forests is to absorb and store great amounts of
water quickly when there are heavy rains. When forests are cut down, this regulation of the flow of water
is disrupted, which leads to alternating periods of flood and then drought in the affected area.

Climate Change: It is well known that global warming is being caused largely due to emissions of
greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, what is not known quite as well is
that deforestation has a direction association with carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Trees
act as a major storage depot for carbon, since they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is
then used to produce carbohydrates, fats, and proteins that make up trees. When deforestation occurs,
many of the trees are burnt or they are allowed to rot, which results in releasing the carbon that is stored
in them as carbon dioxide. This, in turn, leads to greater concentrations of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere.