What Is Deforestation?

Deforestation is an environmental phenomenon that can be defined as a long-term conversion process associated with forest land to convert it into other environmental land such as agricultural land or urbanized land. Deforestation can be a natural product that is it may be caused due to natural calamities or it may be caused by human intervention such as clearing forest area to make more agricultural lands. In recent decades, deforestation becomes prevalent in tropical and subtropical zones of the world, especially in third world countries.

The impact of deforestation is quite naturally devastative. It affects various ecological factors such as changes in biodiversity, influencing Greenhouse effect by affecting global climate, etc. Other effects involve the potential losses associated with various economically important forest resources and destruction of natural habitat living in forests.

In recent decades, the dynamism in deforestation has been observed. In developed countries the rate of deforestation is quite stable, whereas, in developing as well as under-developed countries, it has been advanced quite significantly as a result of increasing rate of population, need for agricultural as well as urbanized lands, need for harvesting forest biomass as fuel etc.

Ten to Fifteen years ago France and Germany could be swallowed whole with lots of room to spare into the Amazon rainforest. Experts today suggest that by the year 2011 there might be no rainforests left in Brazil. The forests have been deforested.

The practice of cutting down trees that are part of a forest, jungle, wood or marsh, but specifically belonging to the former two, and putting the land on which they stood for other uses is deforestation. Deforestation however could be for shorter term gains as well. As the object may be the sale of wood and timber. Deforestation is also done to increase the amount of land available for agriculture, industry and housing. In these cases trees are usually burnt to the ground as the process is quicker and easier. Rare throughout the world but common in America and Australia are forest and bush fires respectively. These fires like the fires that occur in Africa's Kalahari Desert may at times occur due to natural causes such as lightning.