Deforestation is the removal of a forest or stand of trees where the land is thereafter converted to a nonforest use. Examples of deforestation include conversion of forestland to farms, ranches, or urban use. 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.
Problem Statement
1) Climate change- Cutting down portions of tree's canopy, blocks the sun's rays during the day to repel the heat.
2) Agriculture- Farmers cut forests to provide more room for planting crops or grazing livestock.
3) Global Warming- Trees also play a critical role in absorbing the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming.
4) Illegal logging is a pervasive problem, causing enormous damage to forests, local communities and to the economies of producer countries.
4) Illegal logging is a pervasive problem, causing enormous damage to forests, local communities and to the economies of producer countries.
Purpose of the content
- To cut down deforestation
- Lesser deforestation, the earth will be more ecological friendly
- To stop illegal logging industries
- Lesser deforestation, increase of biodiversity (animal habitats)
Review of content
Deforestation ( Peninsular Malaysia and Malaysian Borneo (Sabah & Sarawak)
Rainforest Conservation Fund (RCF)
Posted: 8 November 2011
- In the 1950′s, 73% of the land in Peninsular Malaysia was forested, but more than half of this land has now been lost by conversion to agriculture and another quarter has been logged. This leaves much less than the 39% forest cover decreed by the National Forest Policy.
-By the late 1970′s, more than 250,000 people had been resettled on cleared forest land, and FELDA had become by far the largest land-conversion organization in Malaysia (more than 6000 km2 by early 1980′s).
-Fifty years ago Sarawak, one of the two Malaysian states on the north coast of Borneo, was almost entirely covered with forest, but by 1989 60% of the land had been licensed for timber extraction and huge areas have since been logged. By the late 1980′s, this area supplied almost one-third of the world’s hardwood timber. Lately, the proportion has dropped, due to resource exhaustion, and attention has now shifted to the Neotropics.
-In Borneo, interestingly, the middlemen who buy timber for the mills have become the controlling factor in these enterprises. They can buy logs obtained from illegal sources, and they can buy immature trees, which should be left to provide a future supply of timber. Policy has no effect here
Sadly, much of the logging has been extremely wasteful. In Borneo, loggers remove all accessible hardwood trees in areas designated for cutting, rather than only 56-72% as required by regulations, and the formerly huge expanse of dipterocarp forest has been chopped into fragments. While logging, the timber companies routinely harvest 57% of the forest area in a patchwork of sites; however, they also degrade another 20-30% of the land for roads, logging yards and camps. Little is left, usually less than 20% as undisturbed forest, and that only in isolated pieces (Curran, 1999). Even worse, the forest is not left to regenerate (if it could), but is usually replanted with exotic commercial species in monocultures.
Source : http://www.rainforestconservation.org/rainforest-primer/4-case-studies-in-tropical-deforestation/c-south-and-southeast-asia/3-peninsular-malaysia-and-malaysian-borneo-sabah-and-sarawak
