A Comparison of Deforestation in Indonesia and Brazil

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Deforestation has significantly become a major environmental issue in both Indonesia and Brazil over few years ago. As populations in both countries have impressively increased, the demand of people to exploit the forest by cutting down the trees for their dwelling places and agriculture has also risen up at the same time. Presently, 70 percent of the forests in the world land region have been diminished for human benefits which bring about the adverse impacts to the environment including habitat loss, climate change and wildlife extinction (“Deforestation”, 2013). The objective of this essay is to compare deforestation in Indonesia and Brazil. It looks at the amount and rate of deforestation, the amount of carbon emission, and the governmental policies toward deforestation in both countries.
Firstly, one major similarity in deforestation between Brazil and Indonesia is the amount and rate of the forest devastation. In Indonesia, approximately 50 percent of Sumatra’s forests have massively been destroyed during the period of 1985 to 2008, which have entirely transformed the outlook of Sumatra Island (Watts, 2013). According to Butler (2013), almost 158,000 square kilometers of Indonesia’s forest were diminished by the end 2012. Moreover, the rate of deforestation in Indonesia has continuously increased over the next few decades. Similarly, the amount of forest loss in Brazil was also considered to be the second highest from the year 2000 to 2012, which was approximately 361,000 square kilometers (Butler, 2013). The deforestation rate in Brazil has risen up over 28 percent from the period of August 2012 to July 2013, especially in some states near the Amazon regions that have the total amount of deforestation around 5,843 square ki...

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...overnmental policies toward deforestation. It denotes that Indonesia has high amount and rate of forest removal, along with the excessive amount of carbon emission from deforestation likely the same as Brazil. On the other hand, these two countries have different governmental policies to restraint the problem of deforestation. As Indonesia’s government support more on the program of forest area protection, while the Brazil’s government focuses more on the monitoring and law enforcement. In order to permanently solve the deforestation problem in both countries, citizens should decrease the activities that lead to deforestation and also strictly follow the governmental policies.

Works Cited

(“Deforestation”, 2013), Butler (2013), (Watts, 2013), (“Brazil deforestation up 28%”, 2013), (Arga, 2007), (Karstensen et al, 2013), (Fogarty, 2012), (Assunção et al, 2013).

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