The Amazon is not only the largest forest on the planet but is the planet’s own set of lungs helping it breathe and reduce some of the pollution humans create. However, according to a Brazilian environmentalist, Philip Martin Fernside, the Amazon could well vanish by 2080, if its logging is not curbed.
The forest encompasses 1.2 billion acres and is situated in five different countries—Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana—with 60% of the it in Brazil. Moreover, the Amazon forest constitutes nearly half of the world’s remaining intact forests. Unfortunately, deforestation is a serious threat to the Amazon, which increased rapidly in the recent decades due to a number of various factors, such as the governments building roads into and through the forest, agricultural and private companies logging it for farm lands and many instances of logging for a short-term profit etc.
Additionally, the Amazon, like any other virgin forest, has large quantities of accumulated carbon dioxide, which is released into the atmosphere by any type of logging or tree burning adding to the global warming.
Luckily, the many conservation and environmental groups active in the region have succeeded leading to slowing down the rate of deforestation in the Amazon. Furthermore, an increasing number of the western countries are interested in developing methods, which will protect and preserve the forest as a way to combat their carbon emissions. Thus, perhaps, there’s a way to at least slow down the destruction of the largest forest on Earth…
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