Vital role of forests cited

Destruction of fo-rests was tagged as one of the major culprits of global warming du-ring the recent United Nations Climate Change summit in Bali, Indonesia.

It was noted that forests help clean the atmosphere by absor-bing man-made car-bon dioxide which harms the earth’s ozone layer.

Despite being a re-latively small country, Indonesia has been ranked the third lar-gest greenhouse gas emitter in the world behind the United States and China not because it burns tons of industrial fuel but because of rapid defo-restation.

“Indonesia is losing nearly two percent of its forest each year,” said Ecological Society of the Philippines (ESP) president Anton-io M. Claparols. “Let us not allow this to happen in our country. We cannot afford to lose our organic rich resources and our biodiversity.”

A recent study con-firmed that cutting down forests increases the risk of flooding. According to the re-search made by the Charles Darwin Uni-versity and the Natio-nal University of Sin-gapore, a 10-percent loss of trees in the forest raises the risk of flooding by 28 percent.

“With these scenar-ios in mind, ESP is calling for the Philippine government to protect our remaining forests,” said Claparols who added that reforestation can also reduce erosion and increase water capture.