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Deforestation by humans began taking place already in the Bronze Age but reached its peak under British colonial rule, particularly the 16th and 17th century Plantations, that saw mass scale deforestation to create agricultural lands, and to supplement the need for timber for shipbuilding for Britain's early phase of empire building. [92]
2 March 2023: a study published in Science said that boreal fires, typically accounting for 10% of global fire CO 2 emissions, contributed 23% in 2021, by far the highest fraction since 2000. [59] 2021 was an abnormal year because North American and Eurasian boreal forests synchronously experienced their greatest water deficit. [59]
Deforestation is the main land use change contributor to global warming, [62] Between 1750 and 2007, about one-third of anthropogenic CO 2 emissions were from changes in land use - primarily from the decline in forest area and the growth in agricultural land. [63] primarily deforestation.
Cutting down and clearing trees is second only to burning fossil fuels as a creator of carbon emissions. Fighting the climate crisis becomes inexplicably harder without forests
However, the United Nations Environment Programme report on "Making Peace with Nature" released in 2021 found that most of these efforts had failed to meet their internationally agreed upon goals. [58] Tropical deforestation: In most cases of tropical deforestation, three to four underlying causes are driving two to three proximate causes. [19]
Deforestation in the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro state, 2009. Deforestation or forest clearance is the removal and destruction of a forest or stand of trees from land that is then converted to non-forest use. [1] Deforestation can involve conversion of forest land to farms, ranches, or urban use.
Even despite a moratorium on new logging contracts imposed in 2010, the rate of deforestation continued to increase to an estimated 840,000 hectares in 2012, surpassing deforestation in Brazil. [19] Deforestation in Indonesia peaked in 2016, and thereafter declined, falling by about 30% (comparing 2009–2016 with 2017–2019). [20]
Several studies since the early 1990s [30] have shown that large-scale deforestation north of 50°N leads to overall net global cooling [31] while tropical deforestation produces substantial warming. Carbon-centric metrics are inadequate because biophysical mechanisms other than CO 2 impacts are important, especially the much higher albedo of ...