Canada’s degradation of pristine, intact forests leads world
-CBC News (September 5th, 2014)
“Canada accounts for 21% of global degradation”.
Oil and gas industries building new “pipelines, seismic lines, industrial places, temporary settlements,” roads and with it more chances of logging, have been a major factor of fragmentation in Canada and Russia. Forest fires of human origin and the clearance of forests for more land are also major causes of degradation. Intact forests are gradually disappearing; the picture above shows how “104 million hectares of the world’s remaining intact forests — an area about the size of Ontario — were degraded between 2000 and 2013.”
As future entrepreneurs we have to be aware of decliningnatural resources like oil and lumber and prepare ourselves for a possible gas/timber-less future. There is a reason why so many companies, big and small, are ‘going green’ or becoming more eco-friendly. The loss of these forests not only leads to a decreasing biodiversity of wild plants and animals (caribou, tigers etc.), but to extreme climate change as well, which impacts everyone, not just businesses. It only takes a few hours to cut down trees, but it can take 30, no, more than 100 years for those trees to grow back. The only thing we can do now is to either drastically decrease logging or to find an alternate resource to lumber.