At present day, we are alarmed with the occurrence of uncommon and unprecedented natural disasters such as deadly typhoons, heavy rains, long draught in tropical area, twisters and big floods to name a few. These phenomenon occurs without any warning, disastrously crushed whatever comes into its way. Why these such disasters becoming more severed as the world turning older? From my point of view, there is an activity that probably would be the spark to those wrath of our mother earth, DEFORESTATION!
What is deforestation? In general, deforestation is an activity of total removing of trees, plants and underbush that convert the forested land into exposed barren area. Here I attached some pictures to visualize this phenomenon:
The pictures above show the true nature of deforestation. As we already know, the trees in the forest play important roles to keep our world in balance. Currently, a huge volume of forested area has been cleared for various purposes.
As stated by Rhett A. Butler in http://www.mongabay.com/brazil.html , 60-70 percent of deforestation in the Amazon results from cattle ranches while the rest mostly results from small-scale subsistence agriculture. Despite the widespread press attention, large-scale farming (i.e. soybeans) currently contributes relatively little to total deforestation in the Amazon.
Rebecca Lindsey, 2007 wrote in http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov : "Tropical forests of all varieties are disappearing rapidly as humans clear the natural landscape to make room for farms and pastures, to harvest timber for construction and fuel, and to build roads and urban areas."
Helmut J. Geist (1999) also reported in http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/8/1/18.abstract that an estimated 200 000 ha of forests/woodlands are removed by tobacco farming each year. Deforestation mainly occurs in the developing world, amounting to 1.7% of global net losses of forest cover or 4.6% of total national deforestation. Environmental criticality exists or is emerging in 35 countries with an estimated serious, high, and medium degree of tobacco-related deforestation, mainly in southern Africa, middle east, south, and east Asia, South America, and the Caribbean.
As we can see here, deforestation occurs in order to cater the human's need to survive. But, when we are talking about survivality, does anyone knows and alerts that if there is no more forest exists on earth's surfaces, most of living organisms will perish including human? Respect that truth. We are all gone if deforestation uncontrollably occurs.
Do you wanna know what it will looks-alike if deforestation activities keep expanding without any concerns of reforestation? Think about it. These pictures tell us how fierce our mother nature could be associated with deforestation:
Many major cities in the world will submerged by rising sea water level!
Dust or sand storms will be a common phenomenon.
Children will lost their shelters.
Greenland will gone forever from our world map.
North and south poles will melt down.
Severe drought will occurred.
How comes the deforestation has been associated to the occurrence of natural catastrophes? Some might asks me.
Generally speaking, trees hold a vast amount of world's released carbon dioxide (CO2). If many trees gone, there is no more storage of CO2. As a result, this free CO2 will suspended in atmosphere creating something like a huge blockage. This blockage prevent the deflected heat by earth's surfaces into atmosphere from being directly released to the space. Thus, this trapped heat will caused the earth warmer. This phenomenon also known as "the greenhouse effect".
What will happen next? If the world temperature increases even by 1 degree celcius, the polars will be melt down giving rises of seawater level, tropical rainforest will face unprecedented long draught and more awesome fact is many lifes such as humans especially children and elders and faunas will suffer a severe dehydration symptoms that may lead to the death.
Do you want these smiley, cherish and cutest little our future generations perish because of deforestation? Ask yourself. To be continued...
Written by Zaril Faizal Zaral Gaffar.
The author of this article is a lecturer in Polytechnic Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah, Malaysia. To all viewers, this "Global Forest Issues" section will be published every wednesday. Stay tuned to all forest lovers.
STOP DEFORESTATION AND START DOING REFORESTATION!
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