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Ethiopia: Deforestation: Difference between revisions
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Ethiopia: Deforestation (view source)
Revision as of 15:18, 9 November 2012
, 15:18, 9 November 2012→Specific causes of deforestation
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The specific individual causes are almost too many to list, but the following is an attempt to enumerate some of the most obvious. | The specific individual causes are almost too many to list, but the following is an attempt to enumerate some of the most obvious. | ||
* '''Population pressure''' As noted above, Ethiopia has a population estimated at over 84 million, making it one of the largest in Africa and the 14th largest in the world. Large population increases over the last century have put huge pressure on the land and have resulted in extensive forest clearing for agricultural use, overgrazing, and exploitation of existing forests for fuel wood, fodder, and construction materials. | * '''Population pressure.''' As noted above, Ethiopia has a population estimated at over 84 million, making it one of the largest in Africa and the 14th largest in the world. Large population increases over the last century have put huge pressure on the land and have resulted in extensive forest clearing for agricultural use, overgrazing, and exploitation of existing forests for fuel wood, fodder, and construction materials. | ||
* | * '''War and conflict.''' As was clear from the brief modern history of Ethiopia above, Ethiopia and its people have had to contend with the mayhem caused almost constant conflict throughout much of the 20th century and even into the early 21st century thanks to its attempted colonisation by the Italians and then decades of either repression of Eritrea following its annexation or open internecine warfare triggered by the Marxist putsch of 1974, and then border wars with the newly independent Eritrea at the close of last century. Not only have those wars killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people, but they have also led to the destruction or undermining of national infrastructure and institutions that regulated and policed natural resource use, including forests, disrupted traditional forest husbandry and commercial activities based on cultivation of forest products, reduced local populations to extreme poverty so that they are forced to exploit land and forest resources far beyond their natural capacity to regenerate themselves, and contributed to devastating droughts that seriously eroded forestry ecosystems. | ||
* '''Sources of fuel.''' In a low technology and poverty-stricken society like Ethiopia, the main source of fuel for cooking and heat is wood or charcoal made from wood. Combined with population increase, the result has been widespread felling of timber and hence forest clearance. | |||
* '''Low technological agriculture.''' | |||
== Resources == | == Resources == | ||