Nina van Zyl
UNDER THREAT The Green Lungs of Our Planet
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ur lungs are vital organs of the human body but we tend to forget that forests are the green lungs of our planet. They provide clean air and host an astounding 80% of the planet’s terrestrial biodiversity.
was covered in birchwood forests and woodlands as recently as 1,150 years ago. Along came the Vikings, clearing land for settlement, agriculture, fuel and wood building material. As the population increased, the once extensive birchwood forests were reduced to a mere 1% by the mid-1900s.
According to the World Bank, 1.3 million km² of forests were lost, globally, between 1990 and 2016. To put this into perspective, more than oneand-a-half times the size of Namibia.
Central Europe, too, was once covered in large tracts of forest after they had re-emerged at the end of the last glacial period some 11,700 years ago. Clearing forests for an expanding population, agriculture and the exploitation of trees for construction, furniture and paper took a heavy toll.
The United Nations agency, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates that the Earth loses about 7,6 million hectares of forest every year. By the time you have finished reading this article, the equivalent of nearly 190 soccer fields would have been destroyed. Forests have been and are still being destroyed by illegal logging for furniture, paper and other products, forestclearing for cattle ranching and soy plantations. But, alas, forests are also making way for plantations of products that we often use in our daily lives such as cocoa and palm oil, an ingredient in shampoo. It is hard to believe that the icy wastes of Iceland were once largely covered in forest. Fossil evidence provided proof that between 25% and 40% of Iceland
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Not surprisingly, the forest giants fell first. For the construction of the roof and spire of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, 1,300 oak trees that were between 300 and 400 years old were felled, representing an area of 21 hectares. When the cathedral was ravaged by fire in April this year, the realisation dawned that there are no longer trees tall enough in France to replace its massive oak beams. Approximately 17% of the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest rainforest, was destroyed in just the past 50 years. More alarming is that deforestation in the Amazon reached a record high in May this year when 739 km² of the forest was destroyed in just thirty-one days.
