5 Environmental Effects of Deforestation in Indonesia – Significant

Review by : Yuli SE., MM

The fact that deforestation in Indonesia is getting more and more happening in the years instead of lessening, is quite a concern.

Planting trees, even though it is quite possible, it takes a long time to grow to replace the one who already been cut down.

From a number of forest supervised under Greenpeace, the worst forest damage is caused by conversion of peatlands for palm oil expansion. As well as logging and burning.

1. Landslides

Landslides is one of the disaster faced by people or animal who live up at hills or mountains.

Mostly, landslides happen when forest lose its function to prevent such disaster from happening. At this case, deforestation is one of the reason for the disaster to happen.

Meanwhile, as the function of threes is to adsorb the excess water from rain.

Generally, landslides can be caused by several things, such as:

Erosion due to the increase of water or rain, rivers or ocean waves erode the foot slopes of the steep.
The slope of rocks and soil were weakened through saturation of heavy rain.
Earthquake. It causes a vibration, pressure on the mineral particles and weak the area in the rock mass and resulting soil erosion of the slopes.
Volcanoes. Due to volcanoes can produce dust, rain and dust flow.
Simple things such as the vibration of the engine, the traffic, the use of explosives, and even an excessive weight of lightning.

2. The Discontinuation of the Food Chain

Forest is important to keep the food chain intact and balance. When trees start to get cut down here and there, it’s limited the food supplies for plant-eating animals. This could led into a lot of plant-eating animals death, which will also effect the carnivores.

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3. The Low Quality of Oxygen

Since the beginning of the time, trees have always an important role for the continuity of humanity. Our oxygen come from the natural process that involve trees. Especially now, when the usage of vehicle is high and affect the air every beings breathe.

Many forest were set on fire in order to make it easier for people to built an oil palm plantations. This movement give a lot of backlash for every living beings. Beside the fact that the oxygen we’ve breath become polluted, there is less trees to produce oxygen too.

The example of this case is the case of forest fires in Riau around 2016. 11 company are suspected to be the one behind the mess. The forest fires in Riau caused a thick haze hung in the air.

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4. Global Warming

Global warming is the hottest issue since the erratic climate change happen all over the world. Deforestation is one of the significant cause of global warming due to objects that produce carbon substances to cause the earth to getting hotter.

The carbon substances which can not be converted to oxygen by plants, especially when there no longer many plants around to do so. The carbon substances can also damage the Earth’s ozone layer and resulted the ice in the north pole to melted.

Global warming is a real impact from the effects of the greenhouse and the increasingly deforestation forests.

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5. Drought

The less trees around, the drier the environment around us has become. Tree, beside being an oxygen produce machine, is also where all the hot sunlight went to. As it is the part process of producing oxygen.

When deforestation happen, it’s become clear that not just only we got limited healthy oxygen but also the hot sunlight that human can’t adsorb. It is getting harder and harder to survive in dry seasons, especially if the dry season happen to be the worst of the year for some other geographically reasons.

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The example of this case can be seen in 2015. In that year, the drought hit 8 provinces in Indonesia, such as, West Nusa Tenggara, East Nusa Tenggara, East Java, Central Java, Yogyakarta, West Java, Southeast Sulawesi and Gorontalo. The drought has effect so many aspect of life in that area. They need immediately treatment, especially clean water for consumption and other needs.

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Head of Data Information and Public Relations BNPB Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said due to drought, the water crisis has also occurred on the island of Java and Nusa Tenggara that year.

According to the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics (BMKG) some are dry season drier due to the warming of sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific and central Asia. This has an impact on the mass of water vapor in the waters of Indonesia, attracted to that region.

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Effect of Deforestation in Indonesia on New Era

Until this very moment, deforestation keeps happening, especially the illegal one that almost impossible to keep track to. Disaster keeps happening, the quality of health keeps decreasing and the food chain has nearly become a mess.

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Even so, there is still hope regarding to prevent this deforestation from keeps happening. Reforestation still possible and keeping our eyes focus to illegal logging may as well help too. Now that we already taste the effect of deforestation and absolutely hate it, maybe it’s the right time to start making a difference.