DEFORESTATION and climate change
Digital Art on Metal 40" W X 30" H
THE PHOTOGRAPH
WHAT'S ALARLMING
Cutting trees adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere while at the same time removing the ability of the trees to absorb existing existing carbon emissions.
“As the world seeks to slow the pace of climate change, preserve wildlife, and support billions of people, trees inevitably hold a major part of the answer. Yet the mass destruction of trees—deforestation—continues, sacrificing the long-term benefits of standing trees for short-term gain.
Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Between 1990 and 2016, the world lost 502,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers) of forest, according to the World Bank—an area larger than South Africa. Since humans started cutting down forests, 46 percent of trees have been felled, according to a 2015 study in the journal Nature. About 17 percent of the Amazonian rainforest has been destroyed over the past 50 years, and losses recently have been on the rise. As the world is focused on the pandemic, an area of the Amazon 20 times the size of Manhattan was razed, a 55% increase over the same period in 2019.*
We need trees for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they absorb not only the carbon dioxide that we exhale, but also the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities emit. As those gases enter the atmosphere, global warming increases, a trend scientists now prefer to call climate change. Tropical tree cover alone can provide 23 percent of the climate mitigation needed over the next decade to meet goals set in the Paris Agreement in 2015, according to one estimate.” National Geographic, Climate 101- Deforestation
*New York Times” Spotlight on Virus, Razing of Amazon Only Worsens, Jun 7, 2020