Why does deforestation takes place

Despite the importance of forests, they are being removed at frightening rates. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content.

Image Deforestation Trees are cut down for timber, waiting to be transported and sold. Photograph by Esemelwe.

Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary. Trees are cut down for timber, waiting to be transported and sold. Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.

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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.

In densely populated central Africa, small subsistence plots cover the once-forested hillsides. Although poverty is often cited as the underlying cause of tropical deforestation, analyses of multiple scientific studies indicate that that explanation is an oversimplification.

Poverty does drive people to migrate to forest frontiers, where they engage in slash and burn forest clearing for subsistence. But rarely does one factor alone bear the sole responsibility for tropical deforestation.

State policies to encourage economic development, such as road and railway expansion projects, have caused significant, unintentional deforestation in the Amazon and Central America. Agricultural subsidies and tax breaks, as well as timber concessions, have encouraged forest clearing as well.

On the southern margin of the Amazon, in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, huge expanses of rainforest are being cleared by industrial soybean, sugar cane, and maize producers.

Access to technology may either enhance or diminish deforestation. Underlying factors are rarely isolated; instead, multiple global and local factors exert synergistic influences on tropical deforestation in different geographic locations. Several international groups produce routine estimates of tropical deforestation, most notably the Food and Agriculture Organization FAO of the United Nations, which has been producing a global forest resources assessment every five to ten years since the late s.

The FAO report is based on statistics provided by countries themselves, and because the ability of countries to accurately assess their forest resources varies depending on their financial, technological, and institutional resources, the estimates for some countries are likely more accurate then others. View our Cookie Policy. I accept. Conversion of forests for other land uses, including pulp, palm, and soy plantations, pastures, settlements, roads and infrastructure.

Forest fires: Each year, fires burn millions of hectares of forest worldwide. Fires are a part of nature but degraded forests are particularly vulnerable. These include heavily logged rainforests, forests on peat soils, or where forest fires have been suppressed for years allowing unnatural accumulation of vegetation that makes the fire burn more intensely. The resulting loss has wide-reaching consequences on biodiversity, climate, and the economy.

Forests also absorb thousands of tons of CO2 every year and without them greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will increase, leading to increased global warming. Forests also reduce the impact of floods.

Without them the impact of floods will increase significantly, as seen in Bangladesh. Those that rely on forests for their livelihood and survival are finding it increasingly difficult to do so as more and more of their home is destroyed. This includes indigenous populations who use the forests for most aspect of their lives and people who rely on the tourist industry brought in by the forests such as the rainforests of Brazil.

Deforestation reduces the natural beauty and therefore could threaten the tourism industry. Increasing impacts of floods will also cost more to repair, and protection from floods doesn't come cheap.

Why does deforestation occur and what are its effects?