What is deforestation and its effects?

What is deforestation and its effects?

Deforestation refers to the decrease in forest areas across the world that are lost for other uses such as agricultural croplands, urbanization, or mining activities. Greatly accelerated by human activities since 1960, deforestation has been negatively affecting natural ecosystems, biodiversity, and the climate.

What are the serious effects of deforestation?

The combination of steep slopes, high rainfall, and the lack of tree roots to bind the soil can lead to disastrous landslides that destroy fields, homes, and human lives.

How does deforestation affect human life?

But deforestation is having another worrisome effect: an increase in the spread of life-threatening diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. For a host of ecological reasons, the loss of forest can act as an incubator for insect-borne and other infectious diseases that afflict humans.

Why is it important to stop deforestation?

Keeping forests intact also helps prevent floods and drought by regulating regional rainfall. And because many indigenous and forest peoples rely on tropical forests for their livelihoods, investments in reducing deforestation provide them with the resources they need for sustainable development without deforestation.

Does deforestation lead to global warming?

When trees are cut down and burned or allowed to rot, their stored carbon is released into the air as carbon dioxide. And this is how deforestation and forest degradation contribute to global warming.

Why cutting trees is bad?

Deforestation affects the people and animals where trees are cut, as well as the wider world. In terms of climate change, cutting trees both adds carbon dioxide to the air and removes the ability to absorb existing carbon dioxide.

What is the biggest contributor to deforestation?

Beef production is the top driver of deforestation in the world’s tropical forests. The forest conversion it generates more than doubles that generated by the production of soy, palm oil, and wood products (the second, third, and fourth biggest drivers) combined.

Who is to blame deforestation?

Cattle ranching is the leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. In Brazil, this has been the case since at least the 1970s: government figures attributed 38 percent of deforestation from 1966-1975 to large-scale cattle ranching. Today the figure in Brazil is closer to 70 percent.

How can I stop deforestation?

You can contribute to the efforts against deforestation by doing these easy steps:

1. Plant a Tree where you can.
2. Go paperless at home and in the office.
3. Buy recycled products and then recycle them again.
4. Buy certified wood products.
5. Support the products of companies that are committed to reducing deforestation.

How can we save the forest?

HOW DO WE LOVE TREES? LET US COUNT THE (10) WAYS

1. HOW DO WE LOVE TREES?
2. Conserve trees and forests in your area.
3. Plant trees—the more the better!
4. Support forest conservation organizations.
5. Learn about forests, both local and global.
6. Buy forest-friendly (or certified) products such as shade-grown coffee.

How does recycling help deforestation?

Logging is the biggest source of steady deforestation. Recycling paper decreases the need for logging. If the entire amount recycled last month was only paper, that would mean Dalton recycled enough paper to conserve 2,122 trees. This number of trees can absorb 101,856 pounds of carbon per year.

What happens if we stop recycling?

If everyone in the world stopped recycling, we would be up to our ears in no time in — you guessed it — garbage. Our garbage ends up in landfills, which are filling up fast around the country. But in order to protect the environment and solve the problem of overflowing landfills, we can still do more.