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Deforestation: Problems
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Deforestation causes serious problems: it pushes wildlife toward extinction, degrades soil and water, devastates genetic diversity, adds carbon to the atmosphere (contributing to global warming), increases erosion and worsens flooding. Deforestation ... threatens indigenous cultures like the Penan in Malaysia, the Kayapo of the Amazon and the First Nations of North America.
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There is now general agreement that, as deforestation is the result of many direct actions triggered by various root causes, action on only one front rarely solves the problem. Many efforts are required to encourage sustainable forest management, balancing environmental, social, and economic objectives. Critical are certain national procedures and policies. Since deforestation can produce both benefits and costs, it is important to estimate the gains and losses for each possible forest removal. The United Nations has recommended that every nation preserve at least 12 per cent of its representative ecosystems. Several countries are valuing forest benefits, and defining a Permanent Forest Estate (PFE) and standards for its use.
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Some environmental commentators hope that the problem of tropical deforestation might be alleviated through a shift of emphasis in the timber exporting nations of the South. Barbier et al suggest that developing nations, for whom timber exports are an integral part of the economy, should focus on producing 'higher value' timber products. Higher value timber products are those that involve some refinement and special usage of the raw timber materials. Were the higher value route more profitable, it would no doubt have been adopted more widely. It would seem that the kind of barriers mentioned above exist for this route, namely the short-term incentive to continue to focus upon the export of raw timber. In any case, it is would only, at best, alleviate the problem of rapid deforestation rates and the need to adopt sustainable practices would still remain.
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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,[35] while during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Tokugawa Japan[36] 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 ... 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.
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"Slowing tropical deforestation won't, by itself, solve the climate problem," said Peter Frumhoff, co-author of the study and director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). "But for many developing countries, it is their largest source of emissions. Climate policymakers have a historic opportunity to support their efforts to find economically viable alternatives to deforestation and do their part to slow global warming.
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The following deforestation cases were chosen from the TED database. All of these cases deal with the aspects of trade and deforestation. The cases were chosen in order to give a breadth to the analysis and represent wide range of issues as well as locations. The locations of the studies demonstrates the widespread problem of deforestation and lends credence to the fact that deforestation not only occurs worldwide, but truly is a world problem.
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