Deforestation A case of Amazon Basin

Human activities in Amazon deforestation road construction logging Cattle rearing mining Forest area income

Impact of human activities Shifting cultivation Cattle rearing Plantation Logging Mining Least destruction Most destruction

Slash-and-burn Shifting cultivation farm

Slash-and-burn Indigenous people's field beside the Amazon in Peru. They clear the land and then burn the vegetation, the ash is natural fertilizer. Slash and burn cultivation.

Timber production Logging there is a direct link of road construction and forest destruction. As roads improve, migration increases, forest is cleared to make way to farms and towns. Currently about 18,000 square kilometers is destroyed each year.

Facts about logging An area of 589,000 km2, larger than France, has disappeared in the last 30 years. Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon last year (19,532 km2) was greater than at any time since 1995. The logging industry in the Amazon is highly wasteful. Seventy percent of all logged timber ends up as unusable fragments or sawdust. Approximately 100 million hectares of land, or 20 percent of the entire Amazon region, is held illegally.

Plantation agriculture Aerial view of an orange plantation at Cambuhy farm, Brazil Plantations are operated by foreign companies Tropical crops are grown, such as coffee, cocoa and rubber

Cattle rearing Hamburger Connection: More Steaks, Less Rainforest Over the last eight years, the number of cattle in the Amazon grew to 57 million from 37 million. For each new cow the region lost almost one hectare (about 2.5 acres) of forest - about the size of a soccer field. A cowboy drives cattle on a road in the south of Brazil's Amazonian state of Para.

Mining

Clearing forests for mining In Rondonia State, vast swathes of forest are cleared and the land thus exposed soon becomes desert. At the foot of the world's largest iron mine: settlers pour in but there are no infrastructures and this means: forest clearing, pollution and disease...

Highway construction The Trans-Amazonian highway is a vast project aimed at dividing the Amazon rain forest into a system of road grids, designed to improve land settlements. As a result, the construction of this road has increased the exploitation of precious woods, minerals and the destruction of natural species in the area. Environmentalists are concerned with the building of a 1,080 mile highway linking the Amazon River and southern Brazil.

Hydro-electric power plant a hydroelectric dam on the Paraná River located on the border between Brazil and Paraguay The installed generation capacity of the plant is 14 GW, with 20 generating units of 700 MW each. In the year 2000, it achieved its generating record of 93.4 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), which supplied 93% of the energy consumed by Paraguay and 20% of that consumed by Brazil as of 2005.