Deforestation In Brazil

Deforestation in the Amazon is driven by demographic, political-economic, and socio-economic forces. Demographic reasons include the increase in population size, change in population densities, and migration of people within the country. Political-economic incentives are the result of policies that promote economic development, and the political climate including corruption and the mismanagement of resources. Political-economic factors also include the property rights and several claims to land titling. In addition to these, the development of public services such as roads, railways, water lines, electrical grids and sanitation require large chunks of forest land to be cleared. Oil exploration and mining are supplementary economic incentives that push policy-makers to allow for the deforestation of the Amazon. Socio-economic factors include overall lack of concern about forest and wildlife conservation, individual household behaviors, and agricultural production.

It’s important to note that developed countries are suffering from the effects of damage resulting from a climate change. And countries like Brazil benefits from deforestation but it’s trying to reduce the rate of it every year. Unfortunately The Brazilian government has officially confirmed that deforestation in the Amazon is pacing sharply higher than a year ago. http://news.mongabay.com/2015/0313-brazil-deforestation.html

However, due to more people searching for plots there is greater pressure on the amount of available land. The logging industry is responsible for a relatively small level of deforestation, accounting for 3% in Brazil. Consequently, all these activity contribute together to the rapid loss of what is left of the rainforest and a large proportion of the world’s biodiversity. All of the resources that the rainforest provides could be lost in the next 40 years.

This policy memo addresses the development and expansion of the cattle ranching industry in Brazil, which has contributed to the mass deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon in the last 40 years. It exposes the regional and global consequences to deforestation and provides strategies for the Brazilian government to sustainably manage cattle ranching industries while protecting the future of the Amazon. The rainforest ecosystem is an immense reserve of natural recourses that is far more valuable than the beef produced on Brazilian cattle ranches. Not only does the rainforest create habitat for up to 65% of the world’s biodiversity, but when harvested sustainably, it provides humans with an abundance of spices, foods, oils, medicines

Deforestation poses an alarming threat to Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, and it has been a serious concern for over 40 years. For thousands of years, the abundant, valuable resources in the Amazon were familiar only to the indigenous people of the region. In the 1500’s, before European colonization of Brazil, there were an estimated six to nine million individuals part of different cultures that made up a rich Amazonian society (“History”). Surrounded by the luxuriant rainforest and its natural resources, these indigenous tribes were able to thrive by utilizing the resources without destroying their habitat. After European emigration, the government of Brazil exploited the value of the Amazon’s resources in the twentieth century. In the 1970’s, the Brazilian government discovered the “untapped source of boundless potential” hiding in the Amazon and began using incentives to persuade settlers to develop its resources (Casey). Once economists realized the importance of the resources found within the rainforest, European pioneers set out to transform the Amazon into their home. By endorsing colonization, the government could not only boost the country’s economy, but also gain control over Brazil’s vast territory. The government supported migration to the rainforest and campaigned for the construction of infrastructure (“History”). In concurrence, the development of roads such as the Trans-Amazonian Highway, a 2,000 mile road built in 1972, granted people and machinery entrance to

Architects can in like manner secure rights to surrendered woods arrive essentially by "using" it for no under one year and a day - routinely by seething the neighborhood timberland and setting up a few dairy animals in the range. To cure this wasteful usage of the region, overseers in Brazil should consider laws that farthest point these practices. Then again potentially heads could approve a part of the current laws like the 1996 law that refused Amazon landowners from cutting more than 20% of the forest on their domain. Subsequently, deforestation in the Amazon is especially disturbing and our exercises today will figure out whether Earth will be naturally crushed for the 500 trillion or more individuals that will involve the earth in the midst of that future

In Middle and South America, it is evident that human interactions affect the physical features. The human interaction that affects Middle and South America is deforestation. In 1970’s a period of deforestation began in Brazil with the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway; the road allowed migrant farmers to grow crops (Pulsipher & Pulsipher 2012). Deforestation continued throughout Middle and South America. The use lodging of hardwoods, extracting minerals, oil, gas, stones and clearing off land for raising cattle, and growing crops has impacted most of the land in Middle and South America (Pulsipher & Pulsipher 2012). The human interaction of deforestation has led to many environmental issues, changes in physical features. There are loss

Indigenous rights in Brazil have been very vague throughout the years and were difficult to obtain since many indigenous tribes were seen as an inferior class. There are around 900,000 indigenous people with a total of 240 tribes in Brazil in contrast to the 11 million indigenous people that lived there before the European colonist arrived. It was predicted that 90% died in the first years from diseases that they were not exposed to, such as the flu and smallpox, and the rest who survived the diseases were enslaved. Brazil has one third of the world’s rainforest and half of the amazon forest, but with the expansion of neoliberal policies deforestation has become a serious problem. According to Brazilian authorities, the rubber and cattle industries are responsible for 80% of the deforestation (COHA). This has evidently affected many indigenous communities that lived in the Amazon forest, displacing them from their lands and exploiting them for hard labor. By the 1950s, many predicted that the indigenous population in Brazil would disappear, but they have been able to recover by becoming active in the movement against neoliberal policies and their rights as human.

The contemporary issue in the Amazon Region not only affects the indigenous people living there, but has an irreversible global impact. This significant issue relates to engaged citizenship and past indigenous experiences by the way the indigenous peoples stand up for their land rights, become recognized by the government, and show how this issue has an economic effect on the world. According to BBC news, an estimated 333,000 indigenous people live in the Peruvian Amazon. With more than 60% of this region being rainforests, deforestation acts such as illegal logging, illegal mining, agriculture and infrastructure projects are destroying this indigenous land. This land was at risk because of the government’s lack of recognition and enforcement

Deforestation presents in an abundance of ways, including fires, clear-cutting for agriculture, ranching and development, unsustainable logging for timber, and degradation due to climate change. The foremost reason of deforestation in Latin America is the requirement for food, fuel, shelter, and foreign exchange. Year on year, a space of tropical forest the size of Great Britain is "converted" from an area equal to the size of Europe. Ever since 1950, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), half of the world 's forests have disappeared. “Latin America has lost 37 percent of its tropical forests,” says the FAO. As more and more of Latin American forest are degraded, more and more detrimental effects are being seen. Deforestation is changing a number of resources for tribal groups, altering their way of life, temperatures are increasing at a dangerous rate because of a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, habitats and species such as plants and wildlife are being annexed due to the destructive effects of deforestation. Deforestation is inarguably helpful to supplying money to countries that sell the products from the forest, but huge wealth being generated from the forests comes with large-scale environmental and social costs. The local residences are not benefitting and the funds are being siphoned out of the region.

There are a number of negative effects of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon such as climate change, extinction of endemic species of rich biodiversity and destruction of home of indigenous people. First of all, climate may vary and deteriorate because of deforestation. Especially green house gas emission could have significant impacts on earth residents. Because it is calculated that Amazon rainforest contains about 10% of all carbon in the world, which total release will be disastrous. The deforestation of Amazon is responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions which are the results of logging and burning of Amazon could have serious impacts to the whole world, including global warming (Butler, 2007). For instance, increase of 0.8 C from 1880 was indicated and especially two last decades of 20th century were hottest ones. Moreover, effects of it can be considerably felt in Alaska, Eastern Russia and Canada, where the double increase of temperature compared with total average was indicated (National Geographic News 2007). Another damage that deforestation could make is runoff of Amazon River. It is estimated that if “widespread deforestation” arise, there will be 20% increase in runoff, which could be

Deforestation is defined as: “the clearing of virgin forests, or intentional destruction or removal of trees and other vegetation for agricultural, commercial, housing, or firewood use without replanting and without allowing time for the forest to regenerate itself” (SCRIBD). Deforestation has been a problem in Latin America since the early 1900s and the severity of the dilemma is increasing rapidly. Deforestation not only has consequences for the environment, but also, the indigenous people and the national economy. The logging industry in Latin America is often exploited by multinational companies that are not properly regulated. The land that has provided a home and cultivated indigenous development for centuries is being dissipated rapidly. Due to an exponentially growing global population, there is an increased demand for low priced goods--like timber, crops, and meat. Many Latin American countries value revenue from selling these goods over the health of their local ecosystems. The crisis of deforestation and habitat loss is shifting from a local to global problem. As deforestation continues, global warming escalates worldwide, impacting every country and person. About 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation, which is more than from all the world’s cars, trucks and buses combined (Schwartzman). Puerto Rico and Brazil provide contrasting examples of the impact of deforestation. Puerto Rico had an economic and environmental shift

Another cause of deforestation is infrastructure building. Road construction perhaps contributes the most to eventual levels of deforestation and degradation because roads encourage urbanization (itself responsible for a further 10% of deforestation) and the spread of agriculture into forests, particularly in remote areas where property rights are unclear or poorly regulated. The construction of the Interoceanic Highway connecting Peru and Brazil cuts a swathe through the Amazon jungle.Infrastructure projects such as roads are linked to about 10% of total deforestation in the developing world.

Brazil’s rainforests and America’s rainforests are great examples of the negative effect that deforestation has on these specific areas. One of the rising challenges in our rapidly growing world is the destruction of rainforests and how it is slowly ruining the world that we live in. Deforestation has a lot of destructive impacts on the environment that is surrounding us, one of the most important being its effect on the climate. The fast rise in the world’s population, calling for high demand of resources, is only hastening the effects of deforestation, which can hopefully be put an end to through the enforcement of a handful of simple, key, and sustainable solutions.

Have you ever thought about the trees in Brazil and where they were going? The reasoning is because of deforestation, which is the action of clearing a wide area full of trees. The rain forests across the world could disappear in one hundred years at the current rate of deforestation. An increasing proportion of deforestation was driven by industrial activities and large-scale agriculture. More than three-quarters of forest clearing in the Amazon was because of cattle ranching. The transformation for cattle ranching is the biggest single direct driver of deforestation. More than sixty percent of cleared land ends up as a pasture, which most of the time it ends up being land that has not had any activity in a long time. For most of the Amazon, the main purpose for cattle ranching is to claim land, rather than produce beef or leather. Commercial interests, misguided government policies, inappropriate World Bank projects, and commercial exploitation of forest resources can be held responsible for sixty to seventy percent of deforestation in Brazil to land clearing for pastureland. The driving force behind the ranching business is the real prospect of profit from the activity. This motivates the decisions made by the chain of agents involved, from the primary speculators at the beginning of the process to the capitalized professional entrepreneurs on the strengthened frontier.1