DEFORESTATION AROUND THE WORLD - India Environment Portal

Preface
Forests are giant reservoirs of carbon and biodiversity that must remain largely intact
if we want to bring global warming under control and preserve life on earth.
However, over the last decade, 13 million ha/year of forests have been deforested in
the word. South America and Africa present the highest deforestation rates (> 3.4
million ha/yr) and forest losses were also intense in many places of Asia. Although
studies don’t always agree, they generally indicate that deforestation causes are
related to infrastructure investments, expansions of agricultural and pasture frontiers,
land tenure issues, absence of adequate surveillance by the government, high demand
for forest products (wood), rural settlements, mining, and logging. International
growing demand for commodities and global land crises can also affect deforestation.
Consequently, the impacts resulting from deforestation can include changes in the
rainfall regime - increasing the risk of forest fires during dry seasons - negative
changes on river level and on the quality of water, as well as enormous biodiversity
losses, considering that more than half of the animals and plants living on the planet
live in forests. Deforestation also dramatically affects human population living in or
from the forests. Indigenous peoples and traditional communities -the natural
guardians of the forests - have seen their territories been reduced or invaded by
deforesters. However, they are the most promising alternative to protect the forests
and simultaneously create a sustainable economy based on forest products.
Despite global consequences, deforestation presents local/regional-based dynamics.
This book provides a general view about this dynamics, incorporating the diversity of
causes, impacts and actions to prevent deforestation in several places around the
world. The chapters are divided in three sections: (I) Deforestation Impacts, (III)
Mapping Deforestation, and (II) Preventing Deforestation.
Chapter 1 (Oglesby) discusses the impacts of land cover changes on the climate in
South and Southeast Asia, and Chapter 2 (Nóbrega) presents the effects of
deforestation on the climate and hydrological cycle in Rondonia state, Brazil, that can
have potential effects on the biodiversity, as indicated by Chapter 3’s (Lallo) study on
parasites population in Brazil. Chapter 4 (Manoharan and colleagues), describes how
deforestation and changes in physical and climate parameters could affect the
potential of environmental protection provided by the Mesoamerican Biological
Corridor (Central America). Then, Chapter 5 (Kranjc) exemplifies the large