The high demand for more farmland helps drive the need to cut down more trees, which in turn, contributes to deforestation. Tropical forests have the highest impact rate when it comes to deforestation due to agriculture. In the tropics, only the topsoil is highly fertile, so when the nutrient-rich soil is gone, people cut down more trees to find more fertile topsoil. Tropical forests lose thousands of acres daily due to agricultural use. One way people take out trees for agriculture us is a process called “slash and burn”.
Accessed 1 May 2017. The different ways the trees and plants are cut down, or removed, can tell you what the forest is being cleared for. Clear cutting, fires, natural disasters, ranching and development are just some examples of how the trees and vegetation are removed. Clear-cutting is when large swaths of land are cut down all at once, which is one of the two most common methods of deforestation. The second most common method is using fire to burn the trees down.
The world’s most expansive forest, the Amazon, is the site of the greatest projected loss of natural life-sustaining habitat and beauty due to deforestation which makes efforts to conserve the forest and save its defenseless inhabitants a critical priority and essential duty of our time. Deforestation affects the world in a negative way, with the most dramatic impact being the loss of habitat for millions of species. In fact, “80% of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests.” (National Geographic Deforestation 1) Animals would lose shelter, food resources, and breeding area. Without an ample number of trees, the forests would lose its canopy which would cause extreme temperature swings that are lethal to plants and animals. The loss of trees also impacts climate change, since trees aid the water cycle by returning water vapor to the atmosphere.
The Devastating Environmental Effects of Deforestation The government enacting stricter conservation laws helps end deforestation problems such as the destruction of wildlife, forest fires, flooding, and increasing global temperatures. With the population rising quickly, demand is rising globally for biofuels, food, and living space(“The World”2). Deforestation is there to solve the problem, but not without a hefty cost. As of 2013, every minute on earth 50 football fields of forest vanishes do to the clearing of trees, possibly for products such as paper or wooden furniture (Environment News Service. 2).
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. The more workable solution is to carefully manage forest resources by eliminating clear-cutting to make sure that forest environments remain intact.
Forests are not only to be preserved for the natural habitat of plant and animal life but also at the same time the deforestations are to be prevented because it is the plant which absorb excess moisture from the atmosphere and keep the topsoil intact. When the earth is denuded of plants, soil erosion increases causing environmental disaster. It is estimated that about 36 million acres of forest are being razed annually. The glaring example is the emerald rain forest in the state of Rondonia in Brazil. The rain forest used to be an unsullied storehouse of diversity of life.
In more recent years, growing populations in the Amazon region, combined with increased viability of agricultural operations, have caused a further rise in deforestation rates. Vietnam’s forests, significantly damaged by war, have now been degraded or destroyed by logging and agricultural land clearance to the point where there is almost no untouched primary forest left. And the wider Greater Mekong region is predicted to be one of the world’s hottest “deforestation fronts” over the next 15 years if nothing is done.
Do you know that agricultural lands cover 31% of the earth? And because of deforestation processes these lands are disappearing. Deforestation is defined as removing the forests which includes trees, and plants to make the land accessible for different uses. Forests are important as it is a home of many creatures and it also surrounds the earth with large quantities of oxygen and the disposal of carbon. Some species are suffering from deforestation actions because they depend on these trees and plants as a shelter and as a food source.
The authors explain how every minute there are cut around four hundred threes in Amazon forests . More precisely, twelve to fifteen million hectares of forest are lost each year, the same as thirty six football fields a minute. The forest, and all the diversity, and life in it is being burned with the slash and burn method, just to get more space for animal farming. This means that they can clear land quickly, but it is very bad for the environment because it realises big amounts of Carbon Dioxide. This process is destroying the natural habitat of all the millions of diverse spices that Amazon has to offer, as well as killing the total of two thirds of the word's plant spices.
Deforestation brings many effects either to society or country. It impacts a country’s economy, the life of community, environment and extinction of species. The causes of deforestation are logging, agriculture croplands and pasture expansion, urbanization and more (Ebenezer 2015). Some methods used in deforesting are burning the trees or clear cutting the trees. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (2005 cited in Ebenezer 2015) reported that the global forest area is around 4 billion hectares corresponding to 0.62 hectares per capita, but it is decreasing by 13 million hectares per annum.