Deforestation

Deforestation is the destruction of forests carried out in order to clear land and make it available for other uses. Forests cover about 30 percent of the world's total landmass, but deforestation is steadily eating into that cover: it is estimated that the earth loses 18.7 million acres of forest every year, and in 2016 alone, global tree cover loss reached a record 29.7 million hectares. The common methods by which this destruction is actually carried out are burning trees and clear cutting -- respectively, deliberately setting fire to forest land to clear it, and systematically felling every tree in an area rather than selective logging. The scale of these figures -- nearly a third of the planet's landmass under forest, and tens of millions of acres lost annually -- is what makes deforestation one of the chapter's most consequential single environmental issues, feeding directly into several of the other problems covered …