John Vidal - We are destroying rainforests so quickly they may be gone in 100 years
If you want to see the
world’s climate changing, fly over a tropical country. Thirty years ago, a wide
belt of rainforest circled the earth, covering much of Latin America,
south-east Asia and Africa.
Today, it is being rapidly replaced by great swathes of palm oil trees and
rubber plantations, land cleared for cattle grazing, soya farming, expanding
cities, dams and logging.
People have been
deforesting the tropics for thousands of years for timber and farming, but now,
nothing less than the physical transformation of the Earth is taking place.
Every year about 18m
hectares of forest – an area the size of England and Wales – is
felled. In just 40 years, possibly 1bn
hectares, the equivalent of Europe, has gone. Half the world’s rainforests
have been razed in a century, and the latest
satellite analysis shows that in the last 15 years new hotspots have
emerged from Cambodia to Liberia. At current rates, they will vanish
altogether in
100 years.
As fast as the trees
go, the chance of slowing or reversing climate change becomes slimmer. Tropical
deforestation causes carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, to linger in the
atmosphere and trap solar radiation. This raises temperatures and leads to
climate change: deforestation in Latin America, Asia and Africa can affect
rainfall and weather everywhere from the US Midwest, to Europe and China. The consensus of the
world’s atmospheric scientists is that about 12% of all man-made climate
emissions – nearly as much as the world’s 1.2bn
cars and lorries – now comes from deforestation, mostly in tropical
areas. Conserving forests is critical; the carbon locked up in Democratic
Republic of the Congo’s 150m hectares of forests are nearly three
times the world’s global annual emissions... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jan/23/destroying-rainforests-quickly-gone-100-years-deforestation