Global Warming: Products.)

1.
GLOBAL WARMING
It seems as if every time you turn on the television news, you hear one or the other of the
following catchphrases of the 1990s: global warming, greenhouse effect, climate change. As
it often is with catchphrases, hardly anyone knows what these terms really mean or how they
relate to each other.
In the past 100 years, in our effort to make the Earth a more civilised place, industrial
production has increased by fifty times. Four fifths of that growth has come since 1950.
This production — most of it based on the burning of wood, and of fossil fuels like coal, oil,
and natural gas — has greatly increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
When fossil fuels are burned, they release carbon into the air in the form of carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide allows heat that would normally escape from the Earth’s atmosphere to
remain trapped, as it would in a greenhouse - thus the greenhouse effect.
When do you burn fossil fuels? When you turn on a light, or run an air conditioner, or take a
hot shower, or make toast, you contribute to the greenhouse effect. It is a by-product of the
use of energy — electricity, gasoline, or oil. (When burnt, plastic produces dangerous by-
products.)
But how can carbon dioxide be bad when human beings exhale it every time they breathe?
Plants need carbon dioxide; they use it to grow. Oceans absorb it. And forests drink it in.
Without carbon dioxide, the average surface temperature on Earth would be 0 degrees
Fahrenheit, instead of 59 degrees Fahrenheit. In nature, carbon dioxide is necessary and
harmless. Here is the problem: in our effort to make the world a more comfortable place,
people have produced far too much of it.
By drilling holes into glaciers and testing the air bubbles trapped in ancient ice, by looking at
the fossilised plant tissues, even by looking at the air sealed in old telescopes, scientists have
calculated that the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution contained about 280 parts per
million of carbon dioxide — the highest level recorded in the past 160,000 years. The current
reading is near 360 parts per million. In the next 140 years, the carbon dioxide level should
reach at least 360 parts per million.
We have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by 25 percent in the past century.
Carbon dioxide is not exclusively responsible for the greenhouse problem, however. Other
greenhouse gases include chlorofluorocarbons, nitrogen oxides and methane.
2. DEFORESTATION AND DESERTIFICATION
The Sahel zone lies between the Sahara desert and the land of northern Nigeria and southern
Sudan. Unfortunately, over the last century the Sahara desert has steadily crept (crawled)
southwards eating into once productive Sehel lands. United Nations surveys show that over
70 percent of the dry land in agricultural use in Africa has deteriorated (deteriorate into
something: to become worse) over the last 30 years. Droughts have become more
prolonged (continued) and more severe, the most recent lasting over twenty years in parts of
the Sahel region. The same process of desertification is taking place across southern Africa as
the Kalahari desert advances into (move forward) Botswana.
One of the major causes of this desert advance is poor agricultural land use, driven by the
pressures of increasing population. Overgrazing-keeping too many farm animals on the land -
means that grasses and other plants cannot recover, and scarce water supplies are exhausted.
Overcultivation — trying to grow too many crops on poor land — results in the soil
becoming even less fertile and drier, and beginning to break up. Soil erosion follows, and the
land turns into desert. Another reason of desertification is loss of tree cover. Trees are cut
down for use as fuel and to clear land for agricultural use. Tree roots help to bind the soil
together, to conserve moisture, and to provide a habitat for other plants and animals. When
trees are cut down, the soil begins to dry and loosen, wind and rain erosion increase, other
plant specifies die, and eventually the fertile topsoil may be almost entirely lost, leaving only
bare rock and dust.
The effects of loss of topsoil and increased drought are irreversible. They are, however,
preventable. Careful conservation of tree cover and sustainable agricultural land use have
been shown to halt (stop) deterioration of soils and lessen the effects of shortage of rainfall.
One project in Kita in south-west Mali funded by the UNDP has involved local communities
in sustainable management of forest, while at the same time providing a viable (feasible)
agricultural economy based on the production of soaps, bee-keeping, and marketing nuts.
This may be a model for similar project in other West African countries.
3. Deforestation in the 21st century

When it comes to cutting down trees, satellite data reveals a shift from the patterns of the
past
A
Globally, roughly 13 million hectares of forest are destroyed each year. Such deforestation
has long been driven by farmers desperate to earn a living or by loggers building new roads
into pristine forest. But now new data appears to show that big, block clearings that reflect
industrial deforestation have come to dominate, rather than these smaller-scale efforts that
leave behind long, narrow swaths of cleared land. Geographer Ruth DeFries of Columbia
University and her colleagues used satellite images to analyse tree-clearing in countries
ringing the tropics, representing 98 per cent of all remaining tropical forest. Instead of the
usual ‘fish bone' signature of deforestation from small-scale operations, large, chunky blocks
of cleared land reveal a new motive for cutting down woods.
B
In fact, a statistical analysis of 41 countries showed that forest loss rates were most closely
linked with urban population growth and agricultural exports in the early part of the 21st
century - even overall population growth was not as strong an influence. ‘In previous
decades, deforestation was associated with planned colonisation, resettlement schemes in
local areas and farmers clearing land to grow food for subsistence,' DeFries says. ‘What
we’re seeing now is a shift from small-scale farmers driving deforestation to distant demands
from urban growth, agricultural trade and exports being more important drivers.’
C
In other words, the increasing urbanisation of the developing world, as populations leave
rural areas to concentrate in booming cities, is driving deforestation, rather than containing it.
Coupled with this there is an ongoing increase in consumption in the developed world of
products that have an impact on forests, whether furniture, shoe leather or chicken feed. ‘One
of the really striking characteristics of this century is urbanisation and rapid urban growth in
the developing world,’ DeFries says, ‘People in cities need to eat.’ ‘There’s no surprise
there,’ observes Scott Poynton, executive director of the Tropical Forest Trust, a Switzerland-
based organisation that helps businesses implement and manage sustainable forestry in
countries such as Brazil, Congo and Indonesia. ‘It’s not about people chopping down trees.
It's all the people in New York, Europe and elsewhere who want cheap products, primarily
food.’
D
Dearies argues that in order to help sustain this increasing urban and global demand,
agricultural productivity will need to be increased on lands that have already been cleared.
This means that better crop varieties or better management techniques will need to be used on
the many degraded and abandoned lands in the tropics. And the Tropical Forest Trust is
building management systems to keep illegally harvested wood from ending up in, for
example, deck chairs, as well as expanding its efforts to look at how to reduce the
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‘forest footprint’ of agricultural products such as palm oil. Poynton says, ‘The point is to give
forests value as forests, to keep them as forests and give them a use as forests. They’re not
going to be locked away as national parks. That’s not going to happen.’
E
But it is not all bad news. Halts in tropical deforestation have resulted in forest regrowth in
some areas where tropical lands were previously cleared. And forest clearing in the Amazon,
the world’s largest tropical forest, dropped from roughly 1.9 million hectares a year in the
1990s to 1.6 million hectares a year over the last decade, according to the Brazilian
government. 'We know that deforestation has slowed down in at least the Brazilian Amazon,’
DeFries says. ‘Every place is different. Every country has its own particular situation,
circumstances and driving forces.’
F
Regardless of this, deforestation continues, and cutting down forests is one of the largest
sources of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity - a double blow that both
eliminates a biological system to suck up C02 and creates a new source of greenhouse gases
in the form of decaying plants. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that
slowing such deforestation could reduce some 50 billion metric tons of C02, or more than a
year of global emissions. Indeed, international climate negotiations continue to attempt to set
up a system to encourage this, known as the UN Development Programme’s fund for
reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries
(REDD). If policies [like REDD] are to be effective, we need to understand what the driving
forces are behind deforestation, DeFries argues. This is particularly important in the light of
new pressures that are on the horizon: the need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and
find alternative power sources, particularly for private cars, is forcing governments to make
products such as biofuels more readily accessible. This will only exacerbate the pressures on
tropical forests.
G
But millions of hectares of pristine forest remain to protect, according to this new analysis
from Columbia University. Approximately 60 percent of the remaining tropical forests are in
countries or areas that currently have little agricultural trade or urban growth. The amount of
forest area in places like central Africa, Guyana and Suriname, DeFries notes, is huge.
‘There’s a lot of forest that has not yet faced these pressures.’

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1.

2. DEFORESTATION AND DESERTIFICATION

3. Deforestation in the 21st century

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