Deforestation causes, impacts, and environmental consequences

Deforestation

Effects of Deforestation

The purpose of the current study is to contribute to the knowledge base thoroughly analyzing new deforestation and development data covering the various locations of deforestation up to 2007. The researcher hopes to enrich the current database available, raise new questions, and stimulate additional research. The current researchers believe this kind of analysis is important given the current ongoing discussions regarding global warming. In spite of the considerable political attention that forests have received, little has hitherto been achieved on the ground: tropical deforestation and forest degradation have continued at an unaltered pace. The demands of present societies continue to create pressures that lead to the elimination of forest cover in developing countries. (Wunder 1)

Although deforestation is a phenomenon as old as agriculture, current concern over forest loss is justified by the sheer scale of modern-day destruction." (Ehrhardt-Martinez 567)

Few environmental issues have attracted as much attention worldwide in recent years as deforestation. A major reason for the high visibility of deforestation as an issue is of course its overall impact on the earth's ecological well-being. Third World deforestation also draws attention because of the ways its local ecological, social, and economic causes and consequences ripple around the globe. They note that the primary human contributions to Third World deforestation include commercial logging, increased worldwide consumption of industrial wood, clearing of forests for settlement and agriculture, overpopulation, globalization of trade in wood products, economic development, overgrazing, poor harvest practices, and inadequate enforcement of existing laws. Primary effects on Third World forest communities and their people are unemployment and poverty, ill health, and community displacement and decline. These causes and consequences are all longstanding concerns of community development. (Hibbard)

The current rate of deforestation of approximately 11.3 million hectares of forest worldwide each year, the forests may be irreparably depleted long before a full scientific understanding of the implications of that loss is achieved. Furthermore, they generally find that the long-run value of an intact forest is much higher than the value of alternative land uses. Developmentalists argue that the tangible benefits of current deforestation and the land uses that replace the forest outweigh the potential future benefits of standing forests. They note that the total amount of forested area in the world has been reduced from a maximum of about 6 billion hectares to about 3.5 billion hectares without yet causing catastrophic damage to global life support systems, and they question the proposition that such a change, were it to occur, would prove insurmountable. They contend that a more likely scenario is that global climate change could be dealt with by adaptation and the development of new technologies, leaving their populations better off in the end. (Andersen et al. 2)

Although over the last two decades deforestation has attracted an increasing interest from a large number of scholars and institutions, separate interpretations coexist in the current debate on the precise meaning of the word or its delimitation in regard to related terms such as 'forest loss', 'fragmentation', 'conversion', 'degradation' and 'forest decline'. This involves not only disagreement about what types of anthropogenic intervention are to be seen as compatible with the 'forest' label, but also a more basic debate about which tree-based ecosystems may be characterized as forests, e.g. mono-cultural tree plantations with a limited range of forest services, or comparison between closed and open forests, woodlands, shrub lands, fallows, and so on. For instance, substitution of natural forests by plantations may be regarded as reforestation by government planners, but as deforestation by conservationists. (Wunder 9)

As a measure of human impact on the natural environment, deforestation is a question of both sociological and theoretical import. While human ecologists have often pondered the effects of the environment on social organization, only recently have sociologists considered the impact of societies on the natural environment. Deforestation, as a specific subject of study, is particularly salient to sociological research, given that the felling of trees largely results from human activities. Despite its importance, most empirical studies to date (principally by geographers, demographers, and economists) have been essentially theoretical. The lack of theoretical grounding retards the accumulation of knowledge by reducing the generalize-ability and explanatory power of research findings. Nevertheless, selected theories of social change have been suggested. Environmental degradation and deforestation in particular have been hypothesized to result primarily from three sources of change: population growth, modernization, and dependent development. Although all three have been hypothesized to increase deforestation, this article uncovers hidden complexities in their relationships that yield unanticipated outcomes. As a measure of modernization, for example, urbanization is shown to have a curvilinear effect on the rate of deforestation, resulting in lower rates of deforestation at the highest levels of urbanization. Two previously unexplored measures, inequality and change in tertiary education, are also shown to reduce the rate of deforestation. (Ehrhardt-Martinez 568)

Nowhere in the world has so much forest disappeared so rapidly as in the Brazilian Amazon. According to statistics, Brazil deforested annually 25,540 km2 between 1990 and 1995, the bulk of which occurred in the Amazon. This national figure is between double and triple the amount of forest lost by any other single country (Indonesia is second on the list, with 10,840 km2). In spite of this large absolute loss, estimations indicate that the Brazilian deforestation rate is a modest 0.5% per year. The sheer size of the forest means that accumulated deforestation over the last forty years of aggressive development policies has thus far affected less than 15% of the Amazon forest. Much of the Amazon thus remains a relatively undisturbed environment, and the land-use decisions made by many local actors often reflect this perception of drawing on a seemingly endless pool of forest resources. (Andersen et al. 5)