The importance of Trees

Meat demand and deforestation

In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. 

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 25 to 30 percent - or 1.6 billion tonnes - of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year is a result of deforestation. 

So, what is deforestation and why is it happening?

Deforestation is simply the action or process of clearing forests. At the moment, the world’s total forest area is just over four billion hectares but the FAO reported that each year of the last decade, around 13 million hectares of forests were lost. Almost a third of those losses are occurring in South America, and most of that is happening in the Amazon. 

Livestock production is responsible for 90 percent of Amazonian deforestation that’s happened since 1970. Now, pastures occupy 70 percent of the cleared land and feed crops (food for the animals) cover most of the other 30 percent. At this rate of deforestation, the world’s rainforests, which once covered 14 percent of the earth, could completely vanish within forty years.

That’s a lot of information to digest but the important point is that deforestation is happening right now, most likely to make room for more meat production.

So, four billion hectares of forests, that sounds like a lot. Why does it matter if some of them are cut down?

Deforestation has many, many negative repercussions. Pollution, especially CO2 as mentioned at the start, is a major one. Not only is tons of it produced by the vehicles used to cut down trees, but also by the ever popular slash-and-burn technique used when clear cutting. Ironically, we need trees to fight this pollution because they absorb carbon dioxide, the number one cause of global warming. Cutting trees down means there are less of them to absorb these emissions and to produce the oxygen we need to live. Very bad on both accounts.

Biodiversity loss is another very scary effect of deforestation. Biodiversity is the variety of species that exist and, by clearing forests, we are depriving many plants and animals of their habitats, which means that they will cease to exist, a.k.a. become extinct. In fact, about 50,000 (!!!) different plant, animal, and insect species go extinct every year due to deforestation, often before even being discovered.

But maybe you don’t care about nine-inch long beetles and frogs half the size of your fingernail. But what about medicine? Of the 3,000 plants that the U.S. National Cancer Institute has identified as having active cancer fighting properties, 70 percent of them are found in the rainforest. Also, 25 percent of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from the 1 percent of tropical plants that have been tested. That means we haven’t even experimented with 99 percent of this vast resource and, if we keep destroying it, we’ll never be able to realize the possibilities.

Don’t mind about medical advancements? Surely, then, you care about the land itself. Forests exist where they exist because that is the climate in which they thrive. By taking away what naturally wants to be there (forests) and forcing something that doesn’t (livestock and farming), it can’t last long. A tree’s roots hold the tree, and therefore the soil, in place and the branches and leaves protect the ground from constant exposure to rain. When the trees are gone, the soil is no longer held in place nor protected so it easily erodes away. Runoff increases since the water no longer has any roots to absorb it, making flooding more frequent and extensive. The FAO states, “these conditions encourage more erosion; as a result, sediment loads in rivers are increasing, dams are filling with silt, hydro-electric schemes are being damaged, navigable waterways are being blocked and water quality is deteriorating.” Bad, bad, and more bad. Eventually, most areas that were oncethriving, healthy forests become dry, barren deserts within just a few years.

All of these consequences are directly fueled by the meat industry and the growing demand for its products. If this demand were to decrease, or at least level-off, deforestation could be stopped immediately. As this deforestation article from The Independent states, “No new technology is needed…just the political will and a system of enforcement and incentives that makes the trees worth more to governments and individuals standing than felled.” We are these individuals and we need to show them that the forests are worth more than the meat is.

Source: flex your food

Deforestation par NeOlivier

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.

Source: National Geographic 

Amazon deforestation caused extinction of 26 species

March 4, 2009

Rio De Janeiro (Xinhua): The deforestation in the Amazon rainforest region has led to the extinction of 26 animal and plant species, a UN report said. Another 644 species of animals and plants, including the red-faced spider monkey, the spectacled bear and the otter, were in danger of extinction, it said.

According to the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) report released on Wednesday, the region lost 17 percent of its forest, about 857,666 sq km, nearly equal to the territory of Venezuela, by 2005.

The deforestation in the region was still going on at an accelerated pace, it noted.

Internal and external factors led to the deforestation in each of the nine countries straddling the Amazon rainforest region, the report said.

Urbanisation, exploitation of natural resources and global warming adversely affected its ecological balance, UNEP said.

The report pointed out three key factors that will influence development of the region in the future: public policies, the market, and the development of new technologies.

Source

Here are some facts (disturbing and informative) about the Amazon rainforest.

* Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth’s land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years.

* One and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second.

* Nearly half of the world’s species of plants, animals and microorganisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to rainforest deforestation.

* Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year. As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases.

* The Amazon Rainforest covers over a billion acres, encompassing areas in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and the Eastern Andean region of Ecuador and Peru. If Amazonia were a country, it would be the ninth largest in the world.

* The Amazon Rainforest has been described as the “Lungs of our Planet” because it provides the essential environmental world service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. More than 20 percent of the world oxygen is produced in the Amazon Rainforest.

* More than half of the world’s estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live in the tropical rainforests. One-fifth of the world’s fresh water is in the Amazon Basin.

* The U.S. National Cancer Institute has identified 3000 plants that are active against cancer cells. 70% of these plants are found in the rainforest. Twenty-five percent of the active ingredients in today’s cancer-fighting drugs come from organisms found only in the rainforest.

* A single pond in Brazil can sustain a greater variety of fish than is found in all of Europe’s rivers.

* A 25-acre plot of rainforest in Borneo may contain more than 700 species of trees – a number equal to the total tree diversity of North America.

* A single rainforest reserve in Peru is home to more species of birds than are found in the entire United States.

* One single tree in Peru was found to harbor forty-three different species of ants – a total that approximates the entire number of ant species in the British Isles.

* The number of species of fish in the Amazon exceeds the number found in the entire Atlantic Ocean.

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