LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Deforestation: World
built 658 days ago
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.
Source:
All the positive examples are actually direct causes of deforestation. Throughout history, the fate of the world's forests has strongly reflected the pattern and intensity of land use by societies. Demand for agricultural land, timber, and other forest products, as well as technological change in agriculture (irrigation/dam construction), significantly impacts the mode and rate of transformation of forested areas.
Source:
Forestry experts and policy makers have been meeting in Bonn, Germany, this week to try to put deforestation on top of the agenda for the UN climate summit in Bali, Indonesia, this year. Papua New Guinea, among the world’s poorest nations, last year declared it would have no choice but to continue deforestation unless it was given financial incentives to do otherwise.
Source:
Slowing tropical deforestation, which currently accounts for about 20 percent ofheat-trapping gas emissions worldwide, can make an important contribution to the global emissions reductions that are necessary to avoid dangerous climate change. An international team of eleven top forest and climate researchers, including UCS director of science and policy, Peter Frumhoff, found that cutting deforestation rates in half by mid-century would amount to 12 percent of the emissions reductions needed to keep concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere at relatively safe levels.
Source:
Although subsistence activities have dominated agriculture-driven deforestation in the tropics to date, large-scale commercial activities are playing an increasingly significant role. In the Amazon, industrial-scale cattle ranching and soybean production for world markets are increasingly important causes of deforestation, and in Indonesia, the conversion of tropical forest to commercial palm tree plantations to produce bio-fuels for export is a major cause of deforestation on Borneo and Sumatra.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
World