in southeast asia many forests have been

Indonesia is reported to have approximately half of its land area covered under forest, making it between 2000 and 2010, Indonesia lost approximately 0.82 million ha of forest cover annually, which accounts for approximately 56% of total forest loss in Southeast Asia (Stibig, Achard, Carboni, Raši, & Miettinen, 2014). In 2010, the country had In Southeast Asian, many forests have been cut down to produce timber and to clear land for farms and industries. The destruction of forests has reduced the living space of wildlife. Much of Asian's wildlife is also threatened by over-hunting. Many people kill animals for food or hunt them to sell to zoo, medical research, and pet trader. As more of Southeast Asia's natural forests are cleared and converted into plantations for growing oil palm, rubber and other tree crops, a Duke University-led study finds that 42 percent of H5 Ffcredit. Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions Tourism will always have an impact on the places visited. Sometimes the impact is good, but often it is negative. For example, if lots of people visit one place, then this can damage the environment. The question is - how can we minimize the problems without preventing people from travelling and visiting places? The main aim of ecotourism is to reduce the negative impact that tourism has on the environment and local people. The idea is to encourage tourists to think about what they do when they visit a place. It's great to talk about protecting the environment, but how do you actually do this? There are a number of key points. Tourists shouldn't drop litter, they should stay on the paths, they shouldn't interfere with wildlife and they should respect local customs and traditions. Some people see ecotourism as a contradiction. They say that any tourism needs infrastructure - roads, airports and hotels. The more tourists that visit a place, the more of these are needed and, by building more of these, you can't avoid damaging the environment. But, of course, things aren't so black and white. Living in a place of natural beauty doesn't mean that you shouldn't benefit from things like better roads. As long as the improvements benefit the local people and not just the tourists, and the local communities are consulted on plans and changes, then is there really a problem? In 2002 the United Nations celebrated the "International Year of Ecotourism". Over the past twenty years, more and more people have started taking eco-holidays. In countries such as Ecuador, Nepal, Costa Rica and Kenya, ecotourism represents a significant proportion of the tourist industry. In paragraph 4, the word "avoid" is closest in meaning to ____. Every year, farmers in states neighboring Delhi burn crop residue, sending smoke into the air and across the country. South Asia was home to 44 of the world’s top 50 most polluted cities last year, most of them in India, according to the Swiss air quality technology company IQAir. Kandhari said that though she sympathized with residents in New York and elsewhere, “we really hope that the policymakers in the USA, who are in denial, feel the pain of the developing nations who choke each day in this toxic hell.”The world’s most polluted city last year was Lahore, Pakistan, IQAir says. In Bangladesh, whose capital, Dhaka, was the world’s second-most polluted city Thursday, air pollution is responsible for 20% of all premature deaths, according to a World Bank report this year. Southeast Asia has also seen worryingly high levels of pollution this spring from forest and agricultural fires, endangering public health and threatening the crucial tourism industry in countries such as Thailand, Vietnam and many as 70% of the world’s million annual air pollution-related deaths are in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the United Nations Environment Delhi residents like Deepali Yadav, who says she’s been “dealing with this problem for years,” say they have found ways to cope that could also help those suffering from pollution in the air quality index AQI in New York and elsewhere exceeded 400 Wednesday, well above the 100 that the Environmental Protection Agency considers a healthy limit. “They can try staying indoors and using purifiers, using masks and water sprinklers to settle the smoke a bit,” said Yadav, an electronics engineer. “Strenuous outdoor activities can wait for some time, if that’s possible.”Shreya Bhattacharya, a textile designer, said people in New Delhi and elsewhere in northern India were wearing masks long before the Covid pandemic, especially heading into winter when AQI can exceed 700. She said they use humidifiers and air purifiers, especially while sleeping, and keep potted plants in the house during those months. “Breathing exercises and yoga have helped us greatly in maintaining lung capacity,” she said. An anti-smog gun mounted on a truck sprinkles water to curb dust pollution in New Delhi in Khanna / Hindustan Times via Getty ImagesTaking a shower or washing one’s face, especially the eyes, with cold water “helps remove the burning sensation from exposure to polluted air,” she said.“We try to avoid stepping outside as much as possible and make sure to mask up whenever we do.”Both Bhattacharya and Yadav stressed the importance of making earth-conscious choices.“I try to walk or use public transport whenever possible, surround myself with air-purifying plants, burn less, reuse and repair more, use masks outdoors, eat healthy and live using sustainable and nature-friendly ways,” Yadav Beijing, where AQI approached 1,000 during the “airpocalypse” of 2013, air pollution has improved dramatically but still flares up during annual sandstorms in March and April that partly originate in neighboring Mongolia. Experts say climate change is likely to make the naturally occurring sandstorms more don’t go outside, especially elderly people and Jiang, university student in Beijing “When I was in middle school, I can remember many days when the weather was foggy and visibility was no more than 200 meters 220 yards,” said Sam Li, 23, a Beijing native. “My nose was full of dust, and I felt quite disgusting.”Almost every family she knew had an air purifier, she added. “My high school also had air purifiers to protect students from air pollution.”Li said the most efficient way to prevent pollution from entering homes was to shut all the doors and windows. “If you have to go outside, you need to wear the professional mask,” she said, referring to particulate matter that measures less than micrometers in diameter, like that produced by wildfires. This year, the Chinese capital experienced its worst air pollution March 22, according to the Beijing Municipal Ecological and Environmental Monitoring Center. The AQI that day was 500, state media reported.“The sky was yellow and the pollution was bad, but not to the extent that it is in New York today,” Jungle Jiang, a university student living in Beijing for six years, said via text message. New research has found that the tropical forests in the mountains of Southeast Asia are losing trees at an accelerated rate, deepening a wide range of ecological concerns. Southeast Asia is home to about 15% of the world’s tropical forests and help sustain plant and animal biodiversity. The trees also store carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere where it would further contribute to warming global temperatures. But clearing the forests of trees has reduced the ecosystem’s capacity for carbon storage, according to a study recently published in Nature Sustainability. In many parts of the world, people have cleared out forests to make space for subsistence agriculture and cash crops. In Southeast Asia, illegal logging is also responsible for a huge amount of deforestation. As forests shrink, their ability to counteract human carbon emissions dwindles. “We know there is substantial deforestation on mountains [in Southeast Asia], but we didn’t know if it was increasing and how it affected carbon,” said Zhenzhong Zeng, an earth system scientist at Southern University of Science and Technology in China and a co-author of the study. “Now, we find that it’s increasing.” The researchers used satellite images to track forest loss over time and carbon density maps to calculate corresponding reductions in carbon storage capacity. Their results showed that Southeast Asia has lost 61 million hectares of forest over the last 20 years. In the 2000s, the annual loss was about an average of 2 million hectares a year. Between 2010 to 2019, that number doubled to about 4 million hectares a year. “I think what’s surprising is just the rate that it’s occurring at, and not the fact that it is occurring,” said Alan Ziegler, a physical geographer at Mae Jo University in Thailand and another co-author of the study. About a third of trees cleared were in mountainous regions such as northern Laos, northeastern Myanmar and the Indonesian islands Sumatra and Kalimantan, the study found. Experts previously thought that these trees, protected by rugged mountain landscape, would be less affected by human intervention compared to trees found in flatter lowlands. But the study found that with cultivatable lowlands growing more limited, forest clearance has expanded into the mountains. In 2001, mountain trees made up about 24% of all trees cleared that year. By 2019, it was over 40%. FILE - A view of Khao Yai National Park, 130 kilometers north of Bangkok, Thailand, March 22, 2021. “I think it’s innovative, the way they look at how [forest loss] shifts from lowland areas to the mountain areas,” said Nophea Sasaki, who studies forest carbon monitoring at Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand and was not involved in the study. “I think that’s a great concern.” Forests at higher elevation and on steeper slopes tend to store more carbon than lowland forests, according to the study. If people are clearing out more mountain trees, then the forests could lose even more carbon than current climate change models predict. If land is set aside, trees can regrow and restore their carbon stocks. But the natural habitats forests support and the great biodiversity they contain may be lost forever. Species unique to the region could disappear. The forests’ protection of watersheds and flood prevention capacity may also vanish. “It’s not only about carbon. In terms of environmental destruction on a long-term basis, it would destroy nature. It would destroy all biodiversity,” Sasaki said. Complicating the picture is inconsistent monitoring and enforcement of forest protection between countries and states. Experts say advances in technology, such as the satellite data used in this study, and public attention on the issue will be important for closer monitoring and prevention of forest loss. “We should be obligated to protect the forest because without these forests, we cannot survive,” Sasaki said.

in southeast asia many forests have been