NEWS IN
BRIEF
I. Why Population Growth Matters
to the Future of Forests?
The world's forests provide goods and services essential to
human and planetary well-being. But forests are disappearing
faster today than ever before. Due both to deforestation and
human population growth, the current ratio of forests to human
beings is less than half what it was in 1960. Yet we not only
need more forests, we need forests more than ever before–to
protect the world's remaining plant and animal life, to
prevent flooding, to slow human-induced climate change, and to
provide the paper on which education and communication still
depend. More efficient consumption of forest products and
eventual stabilization of human population–a prospect that
appears more promising today as birthrates decline–will be
needed to conserve the world's forests in the coming
millennium.
Forest Cover is Decreasing...
Half of the world's
original forest cover is gone, a loss that reflects humanity's
intensive use of land since the invention of farming. Of the
forest that remains, less than one-fourth could be considered
relatively undisturbed by human activity. The vast primeval
forests of Europe and Asia survive today only as patchwork
remnants of secondary growth, much of it vulnerable to
logging, encroachment by development, pollution, fire and
disease.
Forests are currently
expanding in much of the industrialized world, while shrinking
in most of the developing world. In just the first five years
of the 1990s, 65 million hectares of forest–an area the size
of Afghanistan– were converted to other uses in developing
countries. By contrast, the industrialized countries gained 9
million hectares of forested land, an area about the size of
Hungary. The pattern of forest loss in developing countries
today differs from past losses in Europe and elsewhere in two
key respects: human populations are much larger than before,
and the pace of deforestation is more rapid. In the last four
decades, an area half the size of the United States has been
cleared of tropical forests, while population in developing
countries has doubled to 4.7 billion. Among the most
encouraging trends for the future of forests is the fact that
fertility and birthrates are now declining in developing
countries, leading demographers to revise downward their
projections of future population growth.
A new measure
of forest resource availability helps illustrate the
increasing scarcity of forests in many countries. The
forest-to-people ratio– a simple division of a country's
forest cover by its population–helps quantify the number of
people living with low levels of forest resources both now and
in the future. Using a ratio of 0.1 hectare of forest cover
per person (roughly a quarter acre) as a benchmark reveals
that 1.7 billion people now live in 40 countries with
critically low levels of forest cover. Many are vulnerable to
scarcities of key forest products such as timber and paper and
risk the collapse of vital forest services such as control of
erosion and flooding in populated areas. In some countries the
forest-to-people ratio declines even though forests expand,
simply because their populations grow more rapidly than their
forests. By 2025,based on United Nations data on
deforestation and projected population growth, the number of
people living in forest – scarce countries could nearly
triple to 4.6 billion. Many are unlikely to have the options
of wealthy countries to import or use substitutes for forest
products and the environmental services forests provide.
Source: Tom Gardener-Outlaw and Robert
Engelmann , Forest Futures : Population , Consumption and Wood
Resources. Washington , DC: Population Action International ,
1999.
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