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Amazon rainforest issues
Research on the amazon rainforest
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The Amazon rainforest has many problems. I will be telling you about three of them. they are that Sao Paulo is running out of water as the rain-making Amazon vanishes, the campaign to keep the oil in the ground in the Amazon, and lastly, about how Amazon Watch is standing with the Indigenous People, and defending the Rainforest...
São Paulo, a Brazilian city of 20 million people, is going through its worst drought in at least 80 years, with reservoirs that supply the city that have dried up after an unusually dry year. One of the causes of this problem could be the growing deforested areas in the Amazon region. "Humidity that comes from the Amazon in the form of vapor clouds has dropped dramatically, contributing to this disastrous situation we are living today," said Antonio Nobre, a leading
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The changes, he said, are "all because of deforestation". Scientists and meteorologists believe the lack of rain that has dried up key reservoirs in São Paulo and neighboring areas in southeastern Brazil is not just the result of an oddity in weather patterns. Instead, global warming and the deforestation of the Amazon are changing the climate in the region by reducing the release of billions of liters of water by rainforest trees, they say. São Paulo residents should brace for a disaster if the drought continues. People were warned last week that São Paulo only has about two weeks of drinking water supplies left.
And as for the campaign to keep the oil in the ground in the Amazon, well, that can’t be going too great. Life on Earth would not be possible without the oxygen and fresh water that is generated from places like the amazon rainforest. But, the Amazon is being severely destroyed by the oil-hungry oil industry for economic gain, threatening the people, plants, and animals living in the rainforest. “Ecuador is not going to get out of poverty just because they come and drill for oil in the Amazon… Ecuador
...ction. Lots of indians die because of the Amazon getting destroyed. The climate is changing because of so much of the disappearing of the rainforest. In every 40 years 20 percent of the Amazon is completely gone. Sadly in about 30 - 40 years we will not have a Amazon rainforest. People are clearing out the Amazon because they want to grow plants and food but we used to have a lot of food but because of the Amazon getting destroying the we don’t have as much, and people want to clear out land for plants and foods but because of destruction the soil will dry out and we will have no more exzotic fruits. As you can see the Amazons environmental problems are devastating.
Following a brief introduction of the history of the development of Brazil, I have broken the paper into five sections; each section is dedicated to one of the five main contributing factors of deforestation. The five main contributors are cattle ranching, farming, logging, infrastructure development, and weaknesses in the government. In each section I will discuss how each factor effects the environment and Brazil at large.
The Amazon Rain Forest Is in Danger of Being Destroyed" by Devadas Vittal. Rain Forests. HaiSong Harvey, Ed. At Issue Series. Greenhaven Press, 2002. Reprinted from Devadas Vittal, Introduction: What Is the Amazon Rainforest? Internet: http://www.homepages.go.com/homepages/d/v/i/dvittal/amazon/intro.html, November 1999, by permission of the author. http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDetailsWindow?displayGroupName=Viewpoints&disableHighlighting=false&prodId=OVIC&action=e&windowstate=normal&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ3010021212&mode=view
There are many rainforests in the world but one of the biggest one is the Amazon rainforest, which is located in the northern half of South America and lies in the countries of Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The Amazon also lies in between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer. The size of the Amazon resembles the size of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains. Since this rain forest lies next to the Equator, the climate is warm and humid. The average temperature is in between sixty-eight to ninety- three degrees. The Amazon has two seasons but each one is six months each. They are classified as the wet season and the dry season. The wet season occurs between December to May and the dry season occurs between June to November. The average rainfall is fifty to two hundred and sixty inches per year. The forest floor only gets up to two to five percent of sunlight since the canopy blocks the sunlight from getting to the forest floor. The Amazon rain forest got the nickname, the world’s pharmacy, because many medicines have been found in the tree bark, the tree’s leaves, and other parts of the trees.
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 and vital research areas (NEWMAN).
Using other dam projects in Brazil as case studies, there are certain predictions made or scenarios created regarding some environmental impacts. The construction of the dam creates a reservoir which allows requires certain amounts of land to be flooded. This leads to loss of land, loss of biodiversity and deforestation. Furthermore, the construction of the reservoir will affect the water quality because residue waste from the construction can settle into the water (Sousa Júnior and Reid 2010). One of the major potential environmental impacts is the drying of a 100 km stretch of the Xingu River due to the two large canals that need to be constructed This would affect any aquatic organism living in the river through depletion throwing the ecosystem off balance. Even though the most recent proposal of the Belo Monte Dam, indicates that the flooded area will be smaller than before, environmentalists and other critics are concerned that this will lead to the construction of other smaller dams (Bratman 2014). This would require more construction materials and possibly lead to more deforestation. Although, the total deforestation percentage would be around 0.04% according to the proposal proposed by Norte Energia, the Amazon Rain Forest holds the most biodiversity and even a small amount can erase hundreds or organisms (Bratman
Therefore, a large amount of trees were cut down and led to forest destruction. People have done these kinds of activities for many years and these deforestation activities have brought about a lot of permanent and long term issues. Although the society has started to consider the problem of deforestation, it is not easy to solve the issues completely. Land desertification can be a huge area and it almost cannot be controlled. In addition, it is not only threatening the people and animals in the Amazon, the world is also threatened by deforestation.
The environmentalists are tyring tTo stop the rampage of the human kind. and tTo give back to something that counts for more than half of the remaining rainforests left in this world. Let’s take a deeper look into the dense, beautiful life of the Amazon Rainforest. Have you ever thought where you might be getting your medicines from? How about the water bottles that
Countries such as Brazil and Indonesia have been greatly affected by deforestation with well over two million hectares of naturally forested land now rendered barren (See appendix 1).
Brazil deforestation has been a global issue for the past decades. In the Amazon rainforest, there have been many miles of trees cut down by loggers, ranchers, and farmers. This has happened ever since the 1970’s when “a flood of miners and settlers rushed into the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, hungry for gold and land” (Brown). The rainforest has been called the world’s lung because it has billion of trees that produces oxygen and absorbs carbon dioxide produced in the air by factories and pollution (Saving). Since it has been cut down, thousands of square miles, it is not absorbing much carbon dioxide and not producing enough oxygen for us to breathe. The government has not made this global issue a top priority because they know that it will cost billions of dollars to restore and fix the rainforest since so much of it has been cut down. The amazon rainforest is 2.124 million square miles and they have cut 20% of the Amazon. “Every day, an average of 214,000 acres (86,000 hectares) of the tropical forest disappears” (“Rainforest”). Also many medicines come from the amazon, and if we keep cutting it down, then we won’t be able to create these medicines to cure people.
The amazon rainforest is in danger. In the past 40 years, the amazon has been reduced to 80% of what it was in the 70s. The amount cut down is roughly equivelant to the size of Chile. Everyday, loggers illegally cut down trees to sell and export them to the global market, illegal roads are built for further access to the amazon, trees are burned down and wasted to clear space for cattle pasture, housing, or farming. These people who want to make money off of the amazon’s land, do not care for the forest, they only want to invade the forest. The amazon produces half of its rainfall with the mouisture it releases into the atmosphere. if another 20% of trees are destroyed, it will begin to dry out and die. The amazon rainforest is a sacred and
In South America lies the largest and most wondrous rainforest in the world, the Amazon Rainforest. This 1.4 billion acre forest represents over half of the planets remaining rainforests, and comprises the largest and most bio-diverse tract of rainforest in the world. Ten percent of all known species on the planet are found in this rain forest, most of which have yet to be discovered. For the past century, the Amazon has been gradually decreasing in size due to agricultural expansion, ranching, infrastructure projects, energy exploration and illegal logging. At its current state, the Amazon is losing land equal to the size of the state of Delaware every year. The destruction of this forest releases 340 million tons of carbon per year according to the World Wildlife Foundation, or WWF, which in turn cause climate changes everywhere around the world. Undiscovered species can hold the key to curing a plethora of diseases, but if those species become extinct those keys are lost forever. If nothing is done to prevent this, the world’s treasure trove of bio-diversity will cease to exist, creating irreversible damage to not only the South American people but also the rest of the world.
In 1993 an experiment was conducted in the Amazonian Rainforest to test how dry soil would affect the ecosystem. The scientists built a 30 by 30 foot roof that would simulate a dying section of the rainforest by not allowing rain drops to fall from the leaves to the jungle floor . Previous experiments showed that moist soil would absorb methane, a potent greenhouse gas . The scientists hoped that in the face of extreme climate change, a dried out Rainforest would absorb more methane and would control the amount of methane, the key ozone destroying gas . Over 4 years of studying the opposite was found; the protected soil emitted up to 3 times more methane than the unprotected soil . Sulfur dioxide ejection into the atmosphere has a way of changing the
Our resources are what kept us alive for so long, but we have started to abuse them. If we lose this resource, the entire ecosystem is going to collapse and we won’t be able to survive much longer. We can stop this before it gets worse and save our ecosystem. We need to start to look at the big picture, and if we don’t stop deforestation we might not see the big picture. So let’s start with Ecuador and keep our world safe from air pollution and ecosystem collapse, because with deforestation everything is a chain
The Amazon Rainforest is the world's largest tropical rainforest that we have today on our planet. It covers a wide range expanding almost entirely across from East to West of South America. It is most famous for its broad biodiversity and includes the famous Amazon River that is home to rare and diverse species. Today, the Amazon Rainforest is under threat of complete deforestation and has greatly lost more than half of its tropical rainforest due to cattle ranching, soy bean farming, sugar cane plantations, palm oil and biofuel agriculture. The indigenous people are doing their best to fight against the government to protect their land and conserve the rainforest but without capital finance, it is seeming to be an impossible project.