What Is Brazil's Current Environmental Problem

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.

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.

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.

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

The contemporary social phenomenon that I would like to discuss is the topic involving the destruction of ecosystems. Like a human community, an ecosystem operates in a similar fashion with plants, animals and other living things sharing an environment's resources such as air, food, and water (soil in the case of plants). In order for the ecosystem to maintain itself every living organism has to play a part in retaining the balance, but when this balance is disrupted the impact can be significant for many of the living things that rely on the ecosystem. An area with an issue such as this is the Amazon rainforest located in Brazil, which has one of the most complex ecosystem environments in the world and yet suffers from the ongoing act of deforestation

The Denver Academy has recently researched and defined some of the important facts surrounding the Amazon rainforest. In 2017, the Amazon rainforest covers 2.1 million square miles of South America. It is a vast ecosystem home to 10% of the world’s known species (The Denver Academy). They go on to say that the trees are so dense, when it rains, it takes 10 minutes for the water to break through the forest roof. The destruction of this habitat could lead to extinction of these species, and have devastating impacts all over the world from the loss of the lungs of the earth. While it is mainly concentrated in Brazil there are also large portions of the rainforest in Peru and Colombia, so many populations and economies are directly affected

On the surface, Brazil does not appear as a country ravaged by poverty however, portions of it are; and its environmental stability is an enormous factor of this. In 2000 the United Nations concocted a plan to assist countries like Brazil; thus the Millennium Development Goals emerged. In essence, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs for short) are a set of targets set to challenge extreme poverty across the globe. As Brazil is not a ‘traditional’ country in the subject of poverty so a specific target had to be included for it to fit in with the MDGs. Target 9 includes two factors: the amount of land covered by forest and the protection of biodiversity, which pinpoint Brazil as a country in need. In Brazil, tourism and the need for lumber are dwindling both the biodiversity of the country, as well as cutting down on the area of land covered by forest. Therefore, Brazil’s ecology and demand for resources cause it to be looked at as a country in need, despite its modernization being equivalent to the rest of the world. With this being said, Brazil’s ecosystem has remained relatively unaffected by change in the last two decades. It will be challenging for Brazil to achieve the seventh Millennium Development Goal of ensuring environmental stability due its lack of a strong governmental structure, a dwindling economy, and the miniscule amount of groups assisting Brazil.

Since 1978 over 750,000 square kilometers of forests have been destroyed and deforested in the Amazon forest across Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. Brazil has the largest area of forest removed annually from the Amazon. Many terrestrial ecosystems in the Amazon are affected significantly by the impacts of deforestation. The Amazon is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. Its rainforests are known to be home to millions of plant and animal species. With the increasing deforestation that is taking place, many of those species and their habitats are under a great threat. Every species that disappears from the ecosystem due to deforestation can destroy the survival chances of another species in the Amazon.

Brazil is home to the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon. It’s a diverse country that possesses several biomes such as: forests (found in more than half of the country), tropical grasslands, and savannahs (located in the central-west region of the country). The southeast region is where natural resources like, petroleum, gold, limestone, nickel, granite, platinum, uranium, and gems can be found. In addition to the nation’s natural resources, Brazil has numerous agricultural products including

The question researched was “How does deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil, South America, impact the environment?” The topic of deforestation in the Amazon was chosen as there is much concern about the problem and for the future of the Earth. There were different research processes used to discover new information about the problems in the Amazon rainforest such as, an interview with a person who currently lives in Brazil, annotating books, journals, internet research and surveys. These helped me find reliable, credible information and helped me decide when information found was not true. The research was presented as a scientific report. This allowed the findings to be presented. The outcome helped

Did you know that Brazil is home to one-third of the world’s rainforests? The beautiful South American country, Brazil, whose size is 3.288 million square miles, is home to one of the largest rainforests of the world, the Amazon rainforest. Something that a lot of people don’t know is that the Brazilian rainforests are extremely important and they not only affect the people of Brazil, but everyone around the world. Since the Amazon rainforest is so large in size, it would only make sense if it affect the world more than other rainforests. Therefore, Brazilian rainforests affect our world greatly because of all of the things that we gain from it, the harmful effects of deforestation, and because of deforestation, we need to teach people to conserve the rainforests.

During the past 30 years, deforestation in the Amazon has been a huge problem. The Amazon Rainforest is home to an estimated one-third of all known animal species and makes up about half of the world’s rainforests. The reasons for the deforestation is to expand pastures for cattle production, and fields to grow soybeans. ("Brazil Geography-Introduction." N.p., n.d. Web. 4 May 2016.)

With the global warming and climate change being such a hot topic and less of a debate more compassion for the planet should not be up for debate. With a rainforest as important to the planet the high rates of deforestation occurring in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil, it should be a national issue, yet is rarely discussed in terms of politics. Even with its contributions to Brazil on terms of tourism, as well as being the home to about 10 percent of the known species, twenty percent has been lost in just the last 40 years. In 2005 deforestation accounted for as much as sixty percent of Brazils total greenhouse gases. Although forest degradation can be the after effect of soy farming, dams, new roads and logging, cattle ranching is by far

Brazil dominates the continent of South America in almost every category from land mass to Gross Domestic Product. It “is the largest and most populous country in South America. Endowed with rich natural resources, Brazil's economy outweighs that of all other South American countries with large and well-developed agricultural, mining, manufacturing and services sectors” (Country Watch). When a nation has a large population, diverse economy and vast resources, putting those resources to their best economic use is often at odds with the wisest use of those resources. Because of the growing population, there has been large scale encroachment of rain forest habitat there.

Brazil is a hybrid nation with a population comprising of many different cultural, racial and ethnic groups. According to the CIA World Factbook, as of the year 2000, 53.7% of Brazilians identified themselves as White, 38.5% as mixed white and black, 6.2% as Black, and the remaining 0.16% as other or unspecified, including the Amerindian people (1). In general, Brazilians trace their origins to four main sources: Amerindian, African, European, and Asian. Beyond the use of race as a social construct, there are several different categories that people use