Consequences of Deforestation

Consequences of Deforestation

It would not be wrong to say that deforestation is one of the largest problems with which Thailand is facing. Between 2000 and 2005, statistics from the Thailand Environmental Profile, Thailand lost its forest cover as high as an average of 1,445,000 hectares, or about 9.1% of those. This crisis is needed to be immediately solved; otherwise, it may lead to a large number of problems in the nearly future. It has been widely known for a long time that deforestation results to several serious problems as follows.

To start with, deforestation can lead to bad soil erosion. A forest, especially growing on the top of mountain, plays an important role preventing soil erosion due to rain and strong wind. A great number of wide-spreading roots of a variety of plants throughout a forest hold the ground surface tightly and protect soil from directly exposing to storms, allows leaves to gradually be decomposed without being flushed out. This helps a forest remain soil fertility and, in turn, leads to the forest sustainability.

The next important consequence of deforestation I would like to refer is the food web damages. The food web is the termed in biology used to describe the relationships among various kinds of animals living in the same habitat. Plants are eaten by herbivores, plant-eating animals, which eaten later by carnivores, meat-eating animals. Destroying a forest would not damage only plants, but it would also have indirectly effects on every species of wildlife. Lower the number of forest, lower the habitat and food of herbivores, in turn, lower the food of carnivores.

Last, but not least, deforestation is widely considered as one of the crucial factors contributing to global warming. It is the fact that a plant is able to change the Carbon dioxide, one of the gases badly released by fuel burnings and is responsible for the global warming. The continuously decreasing number of forest, together with the non-stopped increasing number of fuel burnings makes the situation worse. The temperature of our world is gradually increasing and may cause very serious consequences affecting to every creature in the world.

For the paragraph mentioned above, there can be no doubt that deforestation causes the significant number of serious consequences, such as soil erosion, food web damage, and, most importantly, global warming. Unless we stop destroying forest now, the global-warming effects might destroy all of us in the nearly future.