How is deforestation in the Ecuadorian Amazon affecting climate change?
The Amazon rain forest is the world’s greatest oxygen supplier and carbon sink, with more than half the world’s above-ground carbon stored in its trees. In Ecuador alone it it is estimated that 60,000 to 300,000 hectares of rain forest is being cleared per year. With such an increasingly high rate of deforestation the capability of the Ecuadorian rain forest is being rapidly diminished. Although the trees may still be storing carbon as timber products they are no longer a living organism using and recycling carbon dioxide through the process of photosynthesis. The process photosynthesis also produces oxygen as a product, but with the trees being felled and cleared at such an alarming rate we are losing the world's greatest oxygen supplier.