Timber/Deforestation
Myra Smith – Sarah Tovar – Ashley Shelton
– John O’Leary – Azemina M.
Historical Context
•Deforestation became a problem because of large losses in
tropical locations.
•Deforestation is a natural process, so it dates back to
before modern time.
•Deforestation is often committed in an attempt to increase
or sustain the local population. Such as with urbanization,
boundary waters, and Slash and Burn.
•Deforestation is taking place at an estimated 20 million
hectares per year.
•Deforestation is mostly happening between the Tropic of
Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn and in the Brazilian
part of the Amazon.
•Thomas K. Rudel hypothesizes that powerful businesses such
as the plantation owners and extractive enterprises and
landless peasants along with the local and international
governments, banks and markets all cause deforestation by
their mutual interactions.
•He (Rudel) cites resources indicating that deforestation
rates increased when international banks loaned money to
countries for frontier development projects.
Geographical Context
•Rates of deforestation vary around the world. Southeast
Asia and parts of South America are among the regions of
highest concern to environmentalists.
•Since 1600, 90% of the virgin forests that once covered
much of the lower 48 states have been cleared away. Most
of the remaining old-growth forests in the lower 48 states
and Alaska are on public lands.
•In the Pacific Northwest about 80% of this forestland is
slated for logging.
•The world’s tropical forests are disappearing at an
alarming rate.
•A recent estimate is that about 100,000 km2 are
deforested each year, and another 100,000 km2 are
degraded.
•Estimates are constantly improving, based on satellite
imagery, and deforestation rates change in response to
social and economic conditions, as well as quality and
accessibility of remaining forest.
•Tropical forests once occupied 16 million km2, today about
8-9 million km2 remain
•It is estimated that Latin America and Asia have already
lost 40% of
their original forest; Africa a little more than half.
•In many countries the rate of deforestation is
accelerating.
•For example, most of the forested areas of Bangladesh,
India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and parts of Brazil's
rain forest could be gone by the end of the century.
•Only in the Congo Basin and some of the more isolated
areas of the Amazon Basin does the forest remain largely
intact.
Major Players
•Deforestation is clearing Earth's forests on a massive
scale.
•This often results in damage to the quality of 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 one
hundred years at the current rate of deforestation.
•Forests are cut down for many reasons.
•Most of them are related to money or to people’s need to
provide for their families.
•Forests are cut down as a result of growing urban
sprawl.
•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. This leads to
further deforestation.
•The biggest driver of deforestation is agriculture.
•Farmers cut forests to provide more room for planting
crops or grazing livestock.
•Approximately 40,000 hectares of Pailin’s forests have
been cleared and burned to make way for crops including
corn, beans and cassava.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BONcnWALAAk&feature=player_embedded
Sources of Conflict
•Desertification
•Build up of CO2
•Erosion
•Unusable land
•Landslides
•Habitat fragmentation
•Loss Scientific possibilities
•Cures for deadly diseases
Impact on the U.S.
•One major effect of deforestation is climate change.
• Changes to the surroundings done by deforestation work in
many ways.
•One, there is abrupt change in temperatures in the nearby
areas. Forests naturally cool down because they help retain
moisture in the air.
•Water table is the common source of natural drinking water
by people living around forests.
•Water table is replenishing. That means the supply of water
underground could dry up if not replenished on a regular
basis. When there is rain, forests hold much of the rainfall
to the soil through their roots.
•The immediate and long-term consequences of global
deforestation are almost certain to jeopardize life on Earth.
•Some of these consequences are loss of biodiversity; the
destruction of forest-based-societies, and climatic
disruption.
•As a result of deforestation, we are losing between 50 and
100 animal and plant species each day.
•Flooding is also a quite serious consequence of
deforestation.
• Clearing the forest dramatically increases the surface runoff from rainfall, mainly because a greater proportion of the
rain reaches the ground due to a lack of vegetation which
would suck up the excess rainfall.
Proposed Solutions
•Recycle
•The main and probably the most important way to reduce
deforestation is to inform and give consumers the
choice to reject forest made products, though they will
need viable sustainable alternatives to choose from.
•Sustainable logging.
•Sensitive regions as protected areas.
•In December 2007 the Framework Convention on Climate
Change explored ways of reducing emissions from
deforestation in developing countries.
Sources
•
Historical Context
•
http://www.d.umn.edu/biology/courses/bio5865/documents/Deforestation.pdf
•
http://www.d.umn.edu/biology/courses/bio5865/documents/Deforestation.pdf
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http://www.123helpme.com/preview.asp?id=150919
http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=122399
http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=25872
•
Geographical Context
•
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest
.html
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Major Players
•
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/globalwarming/deforestation-overview.html
•
http://content.undp.org/go/newsroom/2010/april/deforestation-in-cambodia-raisesconcern-about-land-degradation-.en
•
Sources of Conflict
•
Proposed Solutions
•
http://www.d.umn.edu/biology/courses/bio5865/documents/Deforestation.pdf
•
http://www.effects-of-deforestation.com/solutions-to-deforestation.php
•
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http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1505/ifor.10.3.433?journalCode=ifre
Impact on U.S.
•
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Effect-of-Deforestation&id=510236
•
http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/society/deforestation.htm