Five things you’re getting wrong about tropical rainforests
- The Amazon is not uninhabited and it’s not the lungs of world
- It doesn’t produce much of the world’s oxygen, phytoplankton does
- It’s being cleared for farming, but there are better ways to feed 9 billion people
Thousands of fires are burning in the Amazon, eliciting panic around the world and offers of help from the Group of Seven meeting last weekend. Tropical rainforests cover only 2 per cent of the Earth’s surface, but they have an outsize impact on providing habitat, storing carbon and regulating the flow of water. From the “Save the Rainforest” T-shirts of the 1990s to the sci-fi movie Avatar, these areas have come to symbolise the abundance of the natural world - and its vulnerability. But misconceptions about rainforests abound.
Myth No. 1: Logging companies drive deforestation
Calling logging “perhaps the most iconic symbol of forest destruction,” the Union of Concerned Scientists lists “wood products” among its top four causes of deforestation. HowStuffWorks also claims that logging is a “primary driver”of the problem. This myth has worked its way into popular culture: The animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest, from 1992, depicted a logging operation as the main existential threat to the forest’s adorable creatures. And it’s true that logging wreaks havoc on the rainforest: Often conducted illegally, it creates significant carbon emissions and reduces species richness. It can also lead to future deforestation by building roads that increase access to remote areas.
But logging is currently responsible for less than 10 per cent of deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rainforests, according to a recent study in the journal Science. With deforestation, a forest is completely cut down and converted to another use, which normally doesn’t happen when loggers selectively remove valuable trees.
Agriculture accounts for 80 per cent of deforestation in the tropics, with a large portion tied to just three commodities: palm oil, soybeans and beef. These are often traded internationally and show up in everyday products like toothpaste, shampoo, dog food and granola bars.
Myth No. 2: The Amazon rainforest functions as the Earth’s ‘lungs’
French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that “the Amazon rain forest - the lungs which produces 20 per cent of our planet’s oxygen - is on fire,” a claim repeated by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Cristiano Ronaldo. The phrase has also popped up throughout the reporting on the fires in the Amazon, including on CNN, ABC and Al Jazeera.
