Deforestation

Deforestation is the conversion of forested areas to non-forest land use such as arable land, urban use, logged area or wasteland. Historically, this meant conversion to grassland or to its artificial counterpart, grainfields; however, the Industrial Revolution added urbanization. Generally this removal or destruction of significant areas of forest cover has resulted in a degraded environment with reduced biodiversity. In developing countries, massive deforestation is ongoing and is shaping climate and geography.

Jungle burned for agriculture in southern Mexico.

File:Oldgrowth3.jpg Deforestation in the United States. Source of 1620, 1850, and 1920 maps: William B. Greeley, The Relation of Geography to Timber Supply, Economic Geography, 1925, vol. 1, p. 1-11.Source of TODAY map: compiled by George Draffan from roadless area map in The Big Outside: A Descriptive Inventory of the Big Wilderness Areas of the United States, by Dave Foreman and Howie Wolke (Harmony Books, 1992)

Orbital photograph of human deforestation in progress in the Tierras Bajas project in eastern Bolivia. Photograph courtesy NASA.

Deforestation for agriculture in Benambra, Australia

Deforestation results from removal of trees without sufficient reforestation; however, even with reforestation, significant biodiversity loss may occur. There are many causes, ranging from slow forest degradation to sudden and catastrophic wildfires. Deforestation can be the result of the deliberate removal of forest cover for agriculture or urban development, or it can be an unintentional consequence of uncontrolled grazing (which can prevent the natural regeneration of young trees). The combined effect of grazing and fires can be a major cause of deforestation in dry areas. In addition to the direct effects brought about by forest removal, indirect effects caused by edge effects and habitat fragmentation can greatly magnify the effects of deforestation.

While tropical rainforest deforestation has attracted most attention, tropical dry forests are being lost at a substantially higher rate, primarily as an outcome of slash-and-burn techniques used by shifting cultivators. Generally loss of biodiversity is highly correlated with deforestation.

Impact on the Environment

Deforestation alters the hydrologic cycle, alterring the amount of water in the soil and groundwater and the moisture in the atmosphere. Forests support considerable biodiversity, providing valuable habitat for wildlife; moreover, forests foster medicinal conservation and the recharge of aquifers. With forest bioptopes being a major, irreplacable source of new drugs (like taxol), deforestation can destroy genetic variations (such as crop resistance) irretrievably.

Shrinking forest cover lessens the landscape's capacity to intercept, retain and transport precipitation. Instead of trapping precipitation, which then percolates to groundwater systems, deforested areas become sources of surface water runoff, which moves much faster than subsurface flows. That quicker transport of surface water can translate into flash flooding and more localized floods than would occur with the forest cover. Deforestation also contributes to decreased evapotranspiration, which lessens atmospheric moisture which in some cases affects precipitation levels downwind from the deforested area, as water is not recycled to downwind forests, but is lost in runoff and returns directly to the oceans. According to one preliminary study, in deforested north and northwest China, the average annual precipitation decreased by one third between the 1950s and the 1980s [1].

Long-term gains can be obtained by managing forest lands sustainably to maintain both forest cover and provide a biodegrable renewable resource. Forests are also important stores of organic carbon, and forests can extract carbon dioxide and pollutants from the air, thus contributing to biosphere stability and probably relevant to the greenhouse effect. Forests are also valued for their aesthetic beauty and as a cultural resource and tourist attraction.

Characterization

Deforestation is the loss or continual degradation of forest habitat primarily due to human related causes. Agriculture, urban sprawl, unsustainable forestry practices, mining, and petroleum exploration all contribute to human caused deforestation. Natural deforestation can be linked to tsunamis, forest fires, volcanic eruptions, glaciation and desertification, although the desertification process is driven primarily by human causes. The effects of human related deforestation can be mitigated through environmentally sustainable practices that reduce permanent destruction of forests or even act to preserve and rehabilitate disrupted forestland (see Reforestation and Treeplanting).

Definitions

Deforestation defined broadly can include not only conversion to non-forest, but also degradation that reduces forest quality - the density and structure of the trees, the ecological services supplied, the biomass of plants and animals, the species diversity and the genetic diversity. Narrow definition of deforestation is: the removal of forest cover to an extent that allows for alternative land use. The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) uses a broad definition of deforestation, while the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) uses a narrow definition.

Definitions can also be grouped as those which refer to changes in land cover and those which refer to changes in land use. Land cover measurements often use a percent of cover to determine deforestation. This type of definition has the advantage in that large areas can be easily measured, for example from satellite photos. A forest cover removal of 90% may still be considered forest in some cases. Under this definition areas that may have few values of a natural forest such as plantations and even urban or suburban areas may be considered forest.

Land use definitions measure deforestation by a change in land use. This definition may consider areas to be forest that are not commonly considered as such. An area can be lacking trees but still considered a forest. It may be a land designated for afforestation or an area designated administratively as forest.

Use of the term deforestation

It has been argued that the lack of specificity in use of the term deforestation distorts forestry issues.[2] The term deforestation is used to refer to activities that use the forest, for example, fuel wood cutting, commercial logging, as well as activities that cause temporary removal of forest cover such the slash and burn technique, a component of some shifting cultivation agricultural systems or clearcutting. It is also used to describe forest clearing for annual crops and forest loss from over-grazing. Some definitions of deforestation include activities such as establishment of industrial forest plantations are considered afforestation by others. It has also been argued that the term deforestation is such an emotional term that is used "so ambiguously that it is virtually meaningless" unless it is specified what is meant. [3] More specific terms terms include forest decline, forest fragmentation and forest degradation, loss of forest cover and land use conversion. The term also has a traditional legal sense of the conversion of Royal forest land into purlieu or other non-forest land.

Levels of causation

The causes of deforestation are complex and often differ in each forest and country. It may be difficult to determine the cause of deforestation in a particular forest. For example a rise in the price of soybeans may result in soybean farmers displacing cattle ranchers in order to expand their farms. This might cause cattle ranchers to shift to land previously used by slash and burn farmers who in turn shift further into the forest which has been made accessible by roads built by loggers. In this case it may not be clear who "caused" deforestation. In this case it could be claimed that the loggers caused forest degradation and that the slash and burn farmers were agents of deforestation, the cause was demand for farm land. The underlaying causes may be poverty or the trade in international commodities.

Theories of deforestation

Three schools of thought exist with regards to the causes of deforestation - the Impoverishment school, which believes that the major cause of deforestation is "the growing number of poor", the Neoclassical school which believes that the major cause is "open-access property rights" and the Political-ecology school which believes that the major cause of deforestation is that the "capitalist investors crowd out peasants". The Impoverishment school sees smallholders as the principal agents of deforestation, the Neoclassical school sees various agents, and the Political-ecology school sees capitalist entrepreneurs as the major agents of deforestation. Actual data support the first two theories as widespread numerical impacts.

Historical causes

• See timeline of environmental events.
• See Environmental Transformation of North America Prior to European Colonization.

Prehistory

Deforestation has been practiced by humans since the beginnings of civilization. Fire was the first tool that allowed humans to modify the landscape. The first evidence of deforestation shows up in the Mesolithic. Fire was probably used to drive game into more accessible areas. With the advent of agriculture fire became the prime tool to clear land for crops. In Europe there is little solid evidence before 7000 BC. Mesolithic foragers used fire to create openings for red deer and wild boar. In Great Britain shade tolerant species like oak and ash are replaced in the pollen record by hazels, brambles, grasses and nettles. Removal of the forests led to decreased transpiration resulting in the formation of upland peat bogs. Widespread decrease in elm pollen across Europe between 8400-8300 BC and 7200-7000 BC, starting in southern Europe and gradually moving north to Great Britain, may represent land clearing by fire at the onset of Neolithic agriculture.

Pre-industrial history

The historic silting of ports along the southern coasts of Asia Minor (e.g. Clarus, and the examples of Ephesus, Priene and Miletus, where harbors had to be abandoned because of the silt deposited by the Meander) and in coastal Syria during the last centuries BC, and the famous silting up of the harbor for Bruges, which moved port commerce to Antwerp, all follow periods of increased settlement growth (and apparently of deforestation) in the river basins of their hinterlands. In early medieval Riez in upper Provence, alluvial silt from two small rivers raised the riverbeds and widened the floodplain, which slowly buried the Roman settlement in alluvium and gradually moved new construction to higher ground; concurrently the headwater valleys above Riez were being opened to pasturage.

A typical progress trap is that cities were often built in a forested area providing wood for some industry (e.g. construction, shipbuilding, pottery). When deforestation occurs without proper replanting, local wood supplies become difficult to obtain near enough to remain competitive, leading to the city's abandonment, as happened repeatedly in Ancient Asia Minor. The combination of mining and metallurgy often went along this self-destructive path.

Meanwhile most of the population remaining active in (or indirectly dependent on) the agricultural sector, the main pressure in most areas remained land clearing for crop and cattle farming; fortunately enough wild green was usually left standing (and partially used, e.g. to collect firewood, timber and fruits, or to graze pigs) for wildlife to remain viable, and the hunting privileges of the elite (nobility and higher clergy) often protected significant woodlands.

Major parts in the spread (and thus more durable growth) of the population were played by monastical 'pioneering' (especially by the benedictine and cistercian orders) and some feudal lords actively attracting farmers to settle (and become tax payers) by offering relatively good legal and fiscal conditions – even when they did so to launch or encourage cities, there always was an agricultural belt around and even quite some within the walls. When on the other hand demography took a real blow by such causes as the Black Death or devastating warfare (e.g. Genghis Khan's Mongol hords in eastern and central Europe, Thirty Years' War in Germany) this could lead to settlements being abandoned, leaving land to be reclaimed by nature, even though the secondary forests usually lacked the original biodiversity.

From 1100 to 1500 AD significant deforestation took place in Western Europe as a result of the expanding human population. The large-scale building of wooden sailing ships by European (coastal) naval owers since the 15th century for exploration, colonization, slave – and other trade on the high seas and (often related) naval warfare (the failed invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1559 and the battle of Lepanto 1577 are early cases of huge waste of prime timber; each of Nelson's Royal navy war ships at Trafalgar had required 6000 mature oaks) and piracy meant that whole woody regions were over-harvested, as in Spain, were this contributed to the paradoxical weakening of the domestic economy since Columbus' discovery of America made the colonial activities (plundering, mining, cattle, plantations, trade ...) predominant.

In Changes in the Land (1983), William Cronon collected 17th century New England Englishmen's reports of increased seasonal flooding during the time that the forests were initially cleared, though no connection was made at the time.

The massive use of charcoal on an industrial scale in Early Modern Europe was a new acceleration of the onslaught on western forests; even in Stuart England, the relatively primitive production of charcoal has already reached an impressive level. For ship timbers, Stuart England was so widely deforested that it depended on the Baltic trade and looked to the untapped forests of New England to supply the need. In France, Colbert planted oak forests to supply the French navy in the future; ironically, as the oak plantations matured in the mid-nineteenth century, the masts were no longer required.

Norman F. Cantor's summary of the effects of late medieval deforestation applies equally well to Early Modern Europe:

"Europeans had lived in the midst of vast forests throughout the earlier medieval centuries. After 1250 they became so skilled at deforestation that by 1500 AD they were running short of wood for heating and cooking. They were faced with a nutritional decline because of the elimination of the generous supply of wild game that had inhabited the now-disappearing forests, which throughout medieval times had provided the staple of their carnivorous high-protein diet. By 1500 Europe was on the edge of a fuel and nutritional disaster, [from] which it was saved in the sixteenth century only by the burning of soft coal and the cultivation of potatoes and maize."

Specific parallels are seen in twentieth century deforestation occurring in many developing nations.

Deforestation today

The largest cause as of 2006 is slash-and-burn activity in tropical forests. Slash-and-burn is a method sometimes used by shifting cultivators to create short term yields from marginal soils. When practiced repeatedly, or without intervening fallow periods, the nutrient poor soils may be exhausted or eroded to an unproductive state. Slash-and-burn techniques are used by native populations of over 200 million people worldwide. While short-sighted, market-driven forestry practices are often one of the leading cause of forest degradation, the principal human-related causes of deforestation are agriculture and livestock grazing, urban sprawl, and mining and petroleum extraction.Growing worldwide demand for wood to be used for fire wood or in construction, paper and furniture - as well as clearing land for commercial and industrial development (including road construction) have combined with growing local populations and their demands for agricultural expansion and wood fuel to endanger ever larger forest areas.

Agricultural development schemes in Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia moved large populations into the rainforest zone, further increasing deforestation rates. One fifth of the world's tropical rainforest was destroyed between 1960 and 1990. Estimates of deforestation of tropical forest for the 1990s range from ca. 55,630 km² to ca. 120,000 km² each year. At this rate, all tropical forests may be gone by the year 2090.

Nigeria

According to the FAO Nigeria has the world's highest deforestation rate of primary forests. It has lost more than half of its primary forest in the last five years. Causes cited are logging, subsistence agriculture, and the collection of fuelwood.

Brazil

In Brazil the rate of deforestation is largely driven by commodity prices. Recent development of a new variety of soybean has led to the displacement of beef ranches and farms of other crops, which, in turn, move farther into the forest. Certain areas such as the Atlantic Rainforest have been diminshed to less than 10% of their original size and the Amazon Rainforest is awaiting the same fate at 600 fires daily. Although much conservation work has been done, few national parks or reserves are efficiently enforced.

Indonesia

There are significantly large areas of forest in Indonesia that are being lost as native forest is cleared by large multi-national pulp companies and being replaced by plantations. In Sumatra millions of hectares of forest have been cleared often under the command of the central government in Jakarta who comply with multi national companies to remove the forest because of the need to pay off international debt obligations and to develop economically. In Kalimantan the consequences of deforestation have been profound and between 1997 and 1998 large areas of the forest were burned because of uncontrollable fire causing atmospheric pollution across South-East Asia.

United States

Prior to the arrival of European-Americans about one half of the United States land area was forest, about 400 million hectares (1 billion acres) in 1600. For the next 300 years land was cleared, mostly for agriculture at a rate that matched the rate of population growth. For every person added to the population, one to two hectares of land was cultivated. This trend continued until the 1920s when the amount of crop land stablized in spite of continued population growth. As abandoned farm land reverted to forest the amount of forest land increased from 1952 reaching a peak in 1963 of 308 million ha (762 million acres). Since 1963 there has been a steady decrease of forest area with the exception of some gains from 1997. Gains in forest land have resulted from conversions from crop land and pastures at a higher rate than loss of forest to development. Because the pace of development has increased an estimated 9.3 million ha (23 million acres) of forest land is projected be lost by 2050 [4]. Other qualitative issues have been identified such as the continued loss of old-growth forest, the increased fragmentation of forest lands, and the increased urbanization of forest land..

Environmental effects

Atmospheric pollution

Deforestation is often cited as one of the major causes of the enhanced greenhouse effect. Trees and other plants remove carbon (in the form of carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere during the process of photosynthesis. Both the decay and burning of wood releases much of this stored carbon back to the atmosphere. A.J.Yeomans asserts in Priority One that overnight a stable forest releases exactly the same quantity of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Others state that mature forests are net sinks of CO₂ (see Carbon dioxide sink and Carbon cycle).

Wildlife

Some forests are rich in biological diversity. Deforestation can cause the destruction of the habitats that support this biological diversity - thus causing population shifts and extinctions. Numerous countries have developed Biodiversity Action Plans to limit clearcutting and slash and burn agricultural practices as deleterious to wildlife, particularly when endangered species are present.

Hydrologic cycle and water resources

Trees, and plants in general, affect the hydrological cycle in a number of significant ways:

• their canopies intercept precipitation, some of which evaporates back to the atmosphere (canopy interception);
• their litter, stems and trunks slow down surface runoff;
• their roots create macropores - large conduits - in the soil that increase infiltration of water;
• they reduce soil moisture via transpiration;
• their litter and other organic residue change soil properties that affect the capacity of soil to store water.

As a result, the presence or absence of trees can change the quantity of water on the surface, in the soil or groundwater, or in the atmosphere. This in turn changes erosion rates and the availability of water for either ecosystem functions or human services.

The forest may have little impact on flooding in the case of large rainfall events, which overwhelm the storage capacity of forest soil if the soils are at or close to saturation.

Soil erosion

Deforestation generally increases rates of soil erosion, by increasing the amount of runoff and reducing the protection of the soil from tree litter. This can be an advantage in excessively leached tropical rain forest soils. Forestry operations themselves also increase erosion through the development of roads and the use of mechanized equipment.

China's Loess Plateau was cleared of forest millennia ago. Since then it has been eroding, creating dramatic incised valleys, and providing the sediment that gives the Yellow River its yellow color and that causes the flooding of the river in the lower reaches (hence the river's nick-name 'China's sorrow').

Removal of trees does not always increase erosion rates. In certain regions of southwest US, shrubs and trees have been encroaching on grassland. The trees themselves enhance the loss of grass between tree canopies. The bare intercanopy areas become highly erodible. The US Forest Service, in Bandelier National Monument for example, is studying how to restore the former ecosystem, and reduce erosion, by removing the trees.

Landslides

Tree roots bind soil together, and if the soil is sufficiently shallow they act to keep the soil in place by also binding with underlying bedrock. Tree removal on steep slopes with shallow soil thus increases the risk of landslides, which can threaten people living nearby.

Controlling deforestation

Farming

New methods are being developed to farm more food crops on less farm land, such as high-yield hybrid crops, greenhouse, autonomous building gardens, and hydroponics. The reduced farm land is then dependent on massive chemical inputs to maintain necessary yields. In cyclic agriculture, cattle are grazed on farm land that is resting and rejuvenating. Cyclic agriculture actually increases the fertility of the soil. Selective over farming can also increase the nutrients by releasing such nutrients from the previously inert subsoil. The constant release of nutrients from the constant exposure of subsoil by slow and gentle erosion is a process that has been ongoing for billions of years.

Forest management

Efforts to stop or slow deforestation have been attempted for many centuries because it has long been known that deforestation can cause environmental damage sufficient in some cases to cause societies to collapse. In Tonga, paramount rulers developed policies designed to prevent conflicts between short-term gains from converting forest to farmland and long-term problems forest loss would cause, whilst during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Tokugawa Japan the shoguns developed a highly sophisticated system of long-term planning to stop and even reverse deforestation of the preceding centuries through substituting timber by other products and more efficient use of land that had been farmed for many centuries. In sixteenth century Germany landowners also developed silviculture to deal with the problem of deforestation. However, these policies tend to be limited to environments with good rainfall, no dry season and very young soils (through volcanism or glaciation). This is because on older and less fertile soils trees grow too slowly for silviculture to be economic, whilst in areas with a strong dry season there is always a risk of forest fires destroying a tree crop before it matures.

Afforestation

Today, in the People's Republic of China, where large scale destruction of forests has occurred, the government has required that every able-bodied citizen between the ages of 11 and 60 plant three to five trees per year or do the equivalent amount of work in other forest services. The government claims that at least 1 billion trees have been planted in China every year since 1982. In western countries, increasing consumer demand for wood products that have been produced and harvested in a sustainable manner are causing forest landowners and forest industries to become increasingly accountable for their forest management and timber harvesting practices.

The Arbor Day Foundation's Rain Forest Rescue program is a charity that helps to prevent deforestation. The charity uses donated money to buy up and preserve rainforest land before the lumber companies can buy it. The Arbor Day Foundation then protects the land from deforestation. This also locks in the way of life of the primitive tribes living on the forest land.

See also

• Desertification
• Forestry
• Illegal logging
• List of environment topics
• Overpopulation
• Rainforest
• Wilderness
• Assarting
• Mountaintop removal

Sources and references

• BBC TV series 2005 on the history of geological factors shaping human history
• A Natural History of Europe - 2005 co-production including BBC and ZDF
• Whitney, Gordon G. 1996. From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain : A History of Environmental Change in Temperate North America from 1500 to the Present. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-57658-X
• Williams, Michael. 2003. Deforesting the Earth. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-89926-8
• Wunder, Sven. 2000. The Economics of Deforestation: The Example of Ecuador. Macmillan Press, London. ISBN 0-333-73146-8
• FAO / CIFOR report. Forests and Floods: Drowning in Fiction or Thriving on Facts?

External links

• Deforestation - Deforestation and its effect on Orchids
• FAO Forestry
• EU Forestry.
• United Nations Forum on Forests
• CFAN - CIDA Forestry Advisory Network
• Mongabay.com
• University of Wisconsin: Natural Hazards: deforestation
• Deforestation of the Central American Rainforest - Photos
• Himalayan Dilemma
• Amazon Deforestation (Google maps)
• The Disaster of Deforestation

External links: historic deforestation

• Wang Hongchang, "Deforestation and Desiccation in China :A Preliminary Study"
• S. Riehl, "Late Bronze Age Tell Atchana" Archaeobotany and siltation at Tell Atchana (Tübingen University)
• "FAO-Forest Resources Assessment" Change in extent of forest and other wooded land 1990-2005