Deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest

Greenpeace cites the Amazon rainforest is the world's largest intact forest. It is home to more than 24 million people in Brazil alone, including hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Peoples belonging to 180 different groups.

The region is home to 10 percent of all plant and animal species known on Earth. There are approximately 40,000 species of plants and more than 400 mammals, with almost 1,300 different varieties of birds and an insect population in the millions.

In addition the Amazon plays an important role in helping to control the planet’s atmospheric carbon levels. The Amazon Basin stores approximately 100 billion metric tons of carbon.

An ABC Four Corners investigation has found the Brazilian Amazon is being destroyed at rapidly increasing rates from a combination of illegal logging, beef and soy farming and deliberately lit fires.

The clearing is attributed to criminal networks running major illegal logging operations with no consequences. Cleared land is then used to farm cattle to meet the global demand for meat and to grow lucrative soybeans for animal feed. Anyone who opposes the criminal gangs are killed. Over the past decade, more than 300 Brazilians who tried to protect the rainforest have been killed.

In northern Matto Grosso state, the destruction of the Amazon is almost complete, with vast tracts of the forest replaced with soy fields. The beans grown here aren't used for tofu or soy milk. Eighty per cent of Brazil's soy is exported to China as animal feed for poultry, pigs and cattle.

Apart from the loss of biodiversity, the prevention of the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is important because of climate change. If too much is cleared, there could become a point when the forest begins to emit more carbon than it absorbs and no longer generates the rain it needs to survive.

This could result in a climate in the southern portion of the Amazon that could result in the rainforest becoming savanna like. It would be really sad if this happened. The area occupied by the Sahara desert was once a lush oasis. A new hypothesis in the Smithsonian magazine suggests that humans may have been the cause.

Between 8,000 and 4,500 years ago, something strange happened. The transition from a humid to dry climate happened far more rapidly in some areas than could be explained by natural climate change alone, resulting in the Sahara Desert as we know it today. Humans with their domesticated animals such as goats was thought to be the cause.

So it seems rainforest are important for many reasons. As well as a hotbed of biodiversity, they are also the lungs of the planet. They help us breathe.