Status of the World’s Tropical Forests
As recently as the 19th century tropical forests covered approximately 20 percent of the dry land area on Earth. By the end of the 20th century this figure had dropped to less than 7 percent. The factors contributing to deforestation are numerous, complex, and often international in scope. Mechanization in the form of chain saws, bulldozers, transportation, and wood processing has enabled far larger areas to be deforested than was previously possible. Burning is also a significant and dramatic method of deforestation. At the same time, more damage is being done to the land that is the foundation of tropical forest ecosystems: heavy equipment compacts the soil, making regrowth difficult; dams flood untouched tracts of wilderness to produce power; and mills use wood pulp and chips of many tree species, rather than a select few, to produce paper and other wood products consumed primarily by the world’s industrialized nations. Although political, scientific, and management efforts are under way to determine means of slowing the destruction of tropical forests, the world’s remaining acreage continues to shrink rapidly as demand for wood and land continues to rise.
Global implications of deforestation
The implications of forest loss extend far beyond the borders of the states in which the forests grow. The role that rainforests play at the global level in weather, climatic change, oxygen production, and carbon cycling, while significant, is only just beginning to be appreciated. For instance, tropical rainforests play an important role in the exchange of gases between the biosphere and atmosphere. Significant amounts of nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, and methane are released into the atmosphere from these forests. This metabolism is being changed by human activity. More than half the carbon monoxide derived from tropical forests comes from their clearing and burning, which are reducing the size of such forests around the world.
Another consequence of deforestation must be examined. In the upper Amazon River basin of South America, the rainforest recycles rains brought primarily by easterly trade winds. Indeed, surface transpiration and evaporation supply about half the rainfall for the entire region, and in basins of dense forest far from the ocean such local processes can account for most of the local rainfall. Should the Amazon Rainforest, which accounts for 30 percent of the land area in the equatorial belt, disappear, drought would likely follow, and the global energy balance might well be affected. (For further discussion, see Amazon River: Ecological concerns.)
The effects of population growth
The primary forces causing tropical deforestation and forest degradation can be tied to economic growth and globalization and to population growth. Population growth drives deforestation in several ways, but subsistence agriculture is the most direct in that the people clearing the land are the same people who make use of it. Rural populations must produce what food they can from the land around them, and in the rainforest this is most often accomplished via slash-and-burn agriculture. Forest is cleared, the cuttings are burned, and crops are planted for local consumption. However, the infertile tropical soils are productive for only a few years, and so it is soon necessary to repeat the process elsewhere. This form of shifting agriculture has been practiced sustainably among aboriginal cultures worldwide for centuries. Small patches of forest are cleared and abandoned when they become unproductive. The community then settles another isolated part of the forest, thus allowing previously settled land to regenerate.
However, in areas throughout the tropics larger populations than before now live at the forest margins. As subsistence agriculture progresses onto adjacent land, there is no opportunity for regeneration, especially if the shifting population is increasing. In some regions lowland forests have already been exhausted, and upland forests have been cleared. Land located on the slopes of hills and mountains is particularly susceptible to erosion and, therefore, to loss of the topsoil needed to sustain vegetation—arboreal or agricultural. Lowland tropical forests are not immune to erosion, however, as the heavy rainfall washes away unprotected soils.
Another subsistence-related factor in deforestation is demand for fuelwood, which is the main source of energy for 40 percent of the world’s population. As population increases, this demand exerts significant and growing pressure on tropical forests, particularly in Africa.
Resettlement programs
Urban population growth has led to the establishment of resettlement programs in several countries. Governments have made land available to poor families in overcrowded cities, who then have attempted to begin new lives from cleared forest. In Brazil the Transamazonian highway system was begun in the 1960s to enable development and settlement of the Amazon Rainforest. Part of the Transamazonian highway, called BR 364, penetrates the remote state of Rondônia in west-central Brazil. Since the highway’s construction, this region has undergone significant deforestation. Main roads are cut into the forest, and parallel sets of access roads allow access to individual plots of land that are settled by farmers. This method of settlement results in a characteristic “fishbone” pattern when the land is viewed from above. (For a more detailed account of post-World War II settlement in the Amazon, see Amazon River: The economy.)
Brazil’s resettlement program, while extensive, is by no means the largest. Population resettlement to provide agricultural employment and access to land is also important in some Southeast Asian countries, notably Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. By far the largest program has been conducted in Indonesia, where more than four million people have been voluntarily resettled from Java and Bali to the less-populated islands, especially to the province of Irian Jaya on the island of New Guinea. Despite considerable success, the program has been plagued by such problems as improper site selection, environmental deterioration, migrant adjustment, land conflicts, and inadequate financing. A program in Malaysia has been quite successful, in part because it set much smaller settlement targets and was better funded. Vietnamese development policy also utilized the resettlement of people in an effort to revitalize areas outside the major population centres. (For more information, see Southeast Asia: The people.)
While resettlement in Malaysia or Indonesia entails sea travel to isolated islands, roads connect South American population centres to the Amazon, where frontier cities draw both unsuccessful farmers from rural areas and migrants from established cities. The Amazon basin has long been relatively uninhabited, but improved diets and sanitation and the greater ease of transportation are making it more attractive for human settlement. From the mid-1940s onward, a number of “penetration roads” have been built from the populous highlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia into Amazonia, often in conjunction with Brazil’s Transamazonian highway. These roads have funneled untold numbers of landless peasants into the lowlands. Its vast area notwithstanding, the Amazon basin by the late 20th century had a predominantly urban population. Almost one-third of the estimated nine million Brazilians living in the 1.9 million-square-mile (4.9 million-square-km) area officially designated as Legal Amazonia were concentrated in Belém and Manaus (see ), each with more than one million inhabitants, and in Santarém. These cities, which are logistic bases of operations for cattle ranching, mining, timber, and agroforestry projects, are still growing rapidly, with modern residential towers and shantytowns standing side by side. Even frontier trading centres in the interior, such as Marabá, Pôrto Velho, and Rio Branco, have 100,000 or more inhabitants. In the upper reaches of the drainage area, places such as Florencia in Colombia, Iquitos and Pucallpa in Peru, and Santa Cruz in Bolivia have become significant urban centres.