Deforestation and flooding

I don’t usually get political but when it comes to trees it’s a different matter. Over the last few months I have become quite passionate about the preservation, conservation and re-planting of trees in the UK. Recently my attention was drawn to the flooding happening in other countries, so I decided to see if there was any link between deforestation rates and the chances of flooding. What I found shouldn’t have astonished me really, but it did. Every country with a high rate of deforestation was being affected every year by devastating and widespread flooding. Surely no coincidence?

Can a connection be made or is the weather system on a global scale too difficult to determine and makes such connections seem pointless, and the flooding is just a coincidence? Here are some statistics on deforestation rates, and some links with recent flooding stories.

NORTH-EAST AUSTRALIA

I visited Brisbane in 2009. It was a city that made me fall in love with it, but I couldn’t live with the flies pestering all the time. I became accustomed to the “Aussie Wave”, a motion one performs when brushing flies from your face all the time. It’s true – everyone looks like they’re waving all the time. That was its endearing side, but on a more serious note the papers regularly seemed to have articles discussing the degree of deforestation – for and against battling it out in the media for the voters’ attention. Well, perhaps the floods have caught the attention of the people of North East Australia this year?

Here’s an article from 2009 stating that Queensland’s deforestation rate is higher than any other part of Australia: http://www.wwf.org.au/news/queensland-land-clearing/

Here are some figures about the increase in rates of deforestation between 1995 to 1999.

SRI LANKA

I visited Sri Lanka on my honeymoon way back in 1995. I loved the place but was overcome by the degree of poverty that the majority of people lived in. One of the main ways they could try to overcome that poverty seemingly was to cut down their indigenous forest and sell the wood for making furniture that ended up in our stores in the UK and elsewhere. Well, those trees “don’t grow on trees” as it were – they’re not growing back at the same rate that we’re cutting them down.

In the last 20 years Sri Lanka has lost 20% of its rainforest cover, some 490,000 hectares. Here is some of the History and effects of deforestation in Sri Lanka.

Top 5 nations for deforestation in 2005:

Take a look at this chart which shows the Top 5 nations for the amount of deforestation of primary forests in 2005. Now, as an experiment I went online to see if there had been any recent news of flooding in those countries. Well, here you go, these are mostly stories from 2010/11:-

1. Nigeria – http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/09/24/nigeria-floods-dams.html
2. Vietnam – http://www.gmanews.tv/story/203798/41-dead-in-vietnam-floods-19-on-bus-still-missing
3. Cambodia – http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39755855/ns/business/
4. Sri Lanka – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/13/sri-lanka-floods-people-flee-homes
5. Malawi (2006) – http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/Malawi-floods-displace-thousands-20060102

By another calculation of theannual change in forest cover (1990-2005), here’s another catalogue of destruction, all taken from 2010 only:-

1. Brazil – Flooding affects 97,000 homes in North East Brazil, and the current headlines,
2. Indonesia – Flash floods kill 108 in Indonesia
3. Myanmar – 63 die on flooding in Myanmar

Believe me, the rest of those nations cutting down trees don’t fare well either! Congo had terrible floods last year, and the list goes on and on and on. Just pick ANY of those countries listed in that graph and do a search – flash floods, death tolls, reservoirs and rivers bursting their banks, people displaced, lives ruined, homes swept away.

WORLD STATISTICS

In total, between 2000-2005 the world lost 3,745,546,000 hectares of forest in the most active 20 countries. We don’t have figures for the rest of the world as well, but we can guess that the figure would only increase substantially.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

1. Plant a tree.

Make it your mission this year to plant at least ten trees. I will be doing this – buying rooted young trees and planting them on common land. You could do this too, and you would start to make your own tiny tiny impact upon reversing this figure. To help with that aim I have joined the Landshare scheme (details below).

2. Sponsor a tree-planting charity in one of the nations affected.

Harder, and you can never be sure the money is going to the right place, but if you want to go on holiday to one of those countries, then why not take your tree-planting initiative with you? All it takes is to find some seeds whilst you’re there, and plant them in fertile ground.

Here’s a start: Tree Aid

This is the charity to which I have started regularly donating money this year. If you would prefer a UK-based project, they have one of those too:

UK-based scheme: LandShare, Blackmoor Nursery & Tree Revolution

It may not be affecting you personally, but it’s affecting someone not too far away from you. We’re not immune to the effects of flooding in this country. You can make an impact even in a small way by either fighting to preserve your local woodland, parks and lone trees against inconsiderate felling. You can re-plant trees yourself. Who else is going to do it?

Gwas.

Saving his home one tree at a time.

UPDATE: Talking of getting political, here’s a post on Philip Car–Gomm’s blog which talks about The Conservative Party’s environmental record as it affects trees.