At a regional level, forests provide many services. They preserve soils that help prevent flooding, they provide habitat that support biodiversity, they provide shade that keep our cities cool and they help filter pollutants from the air that can affect human health. Forests contribute to this cycle by absorbing and storing carbon in the leaves, stems, trunks, branches and roots of growing trees. This capacity to store carbon, including carbon emitted from human activities, explains why trees have a key role in moderating climate change.
They serve as natural playgrounds for many activities like hiking, horseback riding, bird-watching and camping. For many Indigenous people, forests are essential to cultural traditions, such as hunting and trapping, and also serve as spiritual sanctuaries. The sustainable management of forest ecosystems allow us to benefit from all of the wonderful things we love about the great outdoors. Forests are sustainably managed in Canada so that they can continue to provide social and cultural benefits and ecosystem services, while also providing goods such as wood and other forest products and services to Canadians.
For consumers, it makes sense to examine the products and meats you buy, looking for sustainably produced sources when you can. Nonprofit groups such as the Forest Stewardship Council and the Rainforest Alliance certify products they consider sustainable, while the World Wildlife Fund has a palm oil scorecard for consumer brands. All rights reserved. Climate Deforestation Forests cover about 30 percent of the planet's land mass, but humans are cutting them down, clearing these essential habitats on a massive scale.
What is deforestation? Find out the causes, effects, and solutions. See all of National Geographic's videos on deforestation here. Share Tweet Email.
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Some 60 percent of the diseases that affect people spend part of their life cycle in wild and domestic animals. The research work is urgent — land development is rapidly taking place across regions with high biodiversity, and the greater the number of species, the greater the number of diseases, scientists say.
They are deeply concerned that the next global pandemic could come out of the forest and spread quickly around the world, as was the case with SARS and Ebola, which both emerged from wild animals.
Mosquitoes are not the only carriers of pathogens from the wild to humans. Bats, primates, and even snails can carry disease, and transmission dynamics change for all of these species following forest clearing, often creating a much greater threat to people. Throughout human history pathogens have emerged from forests. The Zika virus, for example, which is believed to be causing microencephaly, or smaller than normal heads, in newborns in Latin America, emerged from the Zika forest of Uganda in the s.
Dengue, Chikungunya, yellow fever, and some other mosquito-borne pathogens likely also came out of the forests of Africa. Forests contain numerous pathogens that have been passed back and forth between mosquitoes and mammals for ages.
Chan School Public Health at Harvard. But humans often have no such protection. What research is demonstrating is that because of a complex chain of ecological changes, the risk of disease outbreaks, especially those carried by some mosquitoes, can be greatly magnified after forests are cleared for agriculture and roads. A flood of sunlight pouring onto the once-shady forest floor, for example, increases water temperatures, which can aid mosquito breeding, explained Amy Vittor, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Florida.
She is an expert in the ecology of deforestation and malaria, which is where this dynamic is best understood. Deforestation creates other conditions conducive to mosquito breeding. Leaves that once made streams and ponds high in tannins disappear, which lowers the acidity and makes the water more turbid, both of which favor the breeding of some species of mosquito over others. Flowing water is dammed up, deliberately and inadvertently, and pools. Because it is no longer taken up and transpired by trees, the water table rises closer to the forest floor, which can create more swampy areas.
A man sleeps inside a mosquito net in his home in West Papua, Indonesia. The link between deforestation and increases in malaria has been known for some time, but research in the last two decades has filled in many of the details.
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