Deforestation 101: What It Is, Why It Happens & Why It's So Harmful

When you hear about the massive tree-planting efforts happening around the world, it's easy to forget just how harmful deforestation can be. Who cares if we lose a tree if we go on to plant one, or even two, in its place, right? Wrong! This mentality doesn't account for the major threat that deforestation plays to human, animal, and ecosystem health.

Deforestation is the process of clearing forested lands, often to make way for human industries like agriculture, transportation, or fossil fuel extraction.

Annika Terrana, a forest director at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), tells mindbodygreen that at the current rate of deforestation, "we're losing about 30 soccer fields' worth of forest a minute."

Most of this is occurring in 24 key regions, which the WWF calls "deforestation fronts." "Those are areas of forests across the tropics and subtropics of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Oceania," Terrana explains.

The drivers of deforestation will differ depending on where in the world you look. Terrana explains that while many forests in the Congo Basin are being cut for roads and railways, for example, forests in Southeast Asia are largely cleared to make way for palm oil production.

It's difficult to keep people from cutting down forests since they typically make money doing so. Take the Amazon rainforest as an example: Liana Anderson, Ph.D., a biologist who studies climate extremes in the region, explains that the deforestation rates in the Amazon rose dramatically at the turn of the century as more farmers cleared forest land to grow and feed cattle that they then went on to sell.

By 2005, a suite of policies was in place to protect the forest, successfully reducing deforestation by rates of up to 37% per year. However, Anderson notes, "We failed to enforce these laws. We failed dramatically." These environmental policies had steadily been weakened in the years leading up to the massive 2019 fires in the region—most of which were intentionally set by farmers and loggers to clear land for growing crops and other commodities. Anderson says that deforestation continues to be a huge concern in the Amazon, exacerbated by practices like land grabbing (private companies claiming ownership of public land for development).

Around 1.6 billion people around the world depend on forests for their livelihoods. As WWF explores in its new report, The Vitality of Forests, deforestation can harm these people by reducing their access to food, shelter, shade, and plant medicine.

Forests—particularly primary forests—are an essential tool for mitigating climate change. As trees grow older, they absorb more and more carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their trunks and root systems. Once they're cut down, that carbon gets released back into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming1. For this reason, the UN has declared that "Stopping deforestation and restoring damaged forests, together with other land-based actions, could provide up to 30% of the climate solution."

Think back to the last time you visited an established, undisturbed forest. The smell of the bark and damp earth, the feel of the cool air on your skin, the sounds of the canopy rustling overhead likely left you feeling calm and invigorated, right? Spending time in the woods is a treat for the senses (and potentially our immune strength) that I, for one, can't imagine losing.

And while you can plant new trees to take on some of the qualities of ancient ones, it will take decades (if not centuries) for these saplings to get established. That's because when we destroy a tree, we also destroy the intricate underground fungal networks that the tree uses to send resources back and forth to its neighbors. We're learning more about these networks (nicknamed, the "woodwide web") all the time, and ongoing research reveals just how fascinating and fragile they are.