What are the effects of cutting down trees?
What are the effects of cutting down trees?
The loss of trees and other vegetation can cause climate change, desertification, soil erosion, fewer crops, flooding, increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and a host of problems for indigenous people.
How does cutting down trees affect the world?
Trees absorb and store carbon dioxide. If forests are cleared, or even disturbed, they release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Forest loss and damage is the cause of around 10% of global warming. There’s simply no way we can fight the climate crisis if we don’t stop deforestation.
How does cutting down trees affect humans and animals?
It causes habitat destruction, increased risk of predation, reduced food availability, and much more. As a result, some animals lose their homes, others lose food sources – and finally, many lose their lives. In fact, deforestation is one of the main causes of extinction.
What are the causes of cutting trees?
The most common pressures causing deforestation and severe forest degradation are agriculture, unsustainable forest management, mining, infrastructure projects and increased fire incidence and intensity.
Why cutting down trees is bad for the environment?
Cutting down trees releases their stored CO2 back into the atmosphere. And, when we don’t replant the fallen trees, we lose out on their continued removal of excess carbon from the atmosphere. This leads to the excess carbon emissions that contribute to the greenhouse effect and accelerate climate change.
What is the effect of deforestation on the people’s health?
Over the past two decades, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that deforestation, by triggering a complex cascade of events, creates the conditions for a range of deadly pathogens—such as Nipah and Lassa viruses, and the parasites that cause malaria and Lyme disease—to spread to people.
What are the effects of deforestation on human health?
But deforestation is having another worrisome effect: an increase in the spread of life-threatening diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. For a host of ecological reasons, the loss of forest can act as an incubator for insect-borne and other infectious diseases that afflict humans.
Why we should not cut down trees?
Removing trees deprives the forest of portions of its canopy, which blocks the sun’s rays during the day and retains heat at night. That disruption leads to more extreme temperature swings that can be harmful to plants and animals.