The Pros And Cons Of Reforestation

Global destruction of natural resources has been on the rise for countless years and has suffered a total loss of 80 percent of forest land. A record 375 km2 of forest land is being destroyed every day (“Environmental Destruction,” 2015). There are policies in place such as the Lacey Act, which stops trafficking in illegally sourced wood products. Australia and Europe have similar laws such as the Australian Illegal logging prohibition Act and the E.U. Timber Regulation. Unfortunately these are just miniscule steps to help minimize deforestation. According to the Charleston Gazette deforestation attributes upward of 15 percent of global carbon emissions, which is greater than all vehicle emissions (2013). The purpose of this essay is to go

Numerous companies are now giving their customers the option to go paperless. It may seem useless however every statement that a company sends is at least three pages. If 3000 people went paperless it would save one tree per month. Now imagine if the population of the US, roughly 318.9 million people, went paperless for one month it would save roughly 115,000 trees a month, 1.4 million trees a year or an estimated 18.5 thousand acres. Now if the world population, 7 billion people, were to go paperless it would result in roughly 2.5 million trees being saved a month, an estimated 30 million trees a year or 41.6 thousand acres. There are people and companies who support the argument that trees are a renewable resource and are there to utilize as needed. The point is also made that there are steps taken by the paper industry to help minimize deforestation such as planting trees to replace what was cut. This is part of the process of reforestation, which helps replenish the areas that have been cut and restoring habitats. However, there are still excessive amounts of carbon being released into the atmosphere as well as the amount of trees being illegally logged increases without re-populating those areas. Laurance points out that “carbon trading is the leading strategy to combat harmful climate change while also potentially reducing threats to biodiversity (2010).” Well what is carbon trading and how can it help? According to Laurance “under existing or future international agreements to limit carbon emissions … participating nations agree to reduce their emissions to a certain level (2010).” If the governments can figure out a way to get carbon trading to work it could help reduce the carbon emission produced by