Deforestation Facts for Kids: Trees are cut down everyday for us to have desks, beds and to have papers o write on. So what do you think we can do to stop deforestation?
Deforestation is the process of cutting down a large area of forest to make way for other non-forest uses like farming. It takes a large area of trees away from the environment in a short time and it has impacts over every aspect of the habitat and food chain. We cut down 15 billion trees in the world every year but only 5 billion trees are planted to reforest those areas. That means the world loses 10 billion trees every year.
Trees play an important role in regulating the environment, they take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen which we breathe. The carbon taken in by trees is stored so that it doesn’t enter the atmosphere.
When trees are cut down they release the carbon they stored inside which enters the atmosphere. This means that deforestation adds huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists estimate that deforestation is the cause for 20% of the worlds carbon emissions.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, that means that it traps warmth in the atmosphere and increases the global temperature, leading to global warming.
Deforestation also has an impact on animals which live in the forest, who lose their home when the trees are cut down. When these animals leave the forest to move into where humans live they can bring diseases with them. This can bring more illnesses to humans as well as animals.
Trees don’t just store carbon, they also pull water from deep underground and store it and release it into the atmosphere as a part of the water cycle. Rainforests are very warm and wet climates and they play a key role in the water cycle which produces fresh water for us to drink. Rainforests produce around 20% of the freshwater in the world making them very important to the planet. If deforestation isn’t slowed down or stopped we might run out of rainforests in as little as 100 years so we need to look at changes we can make to prevent it.
One of the ways we can reduce the impact of deforestation is to reduce, reuse, and recycle. If we recycle paper products it will reduce the amount of paper needed to be produced. That means we will need to cut down less trees. A super easy way to reduce your paper use is to draw on both sides of each page in a notebook, why not try it and see the difference you can make!
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about deforestation as much as we loved teaching you about it. Now that you know how important the environment is to our planet Earth, you can move on to learn more about our environmental topics like: Energy, Wind Energy, Electricity and the Water Cycle.
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