Lesson video

Hi there, I'm Mr. Buckingham, and it's so good to see you here for today's lesson.

In today's lesson, we're going to be looking at the subject of the essay we're going to be writing in this unit: the Amazon rainforest and the deforestation that's happening there.

I think you're going to find this really interesting.

So let's get going.

Today's lesson is called Researching Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest, and it comes from a unit called the Amazon Rainforest Essay Writing.

By the end of today's lesson, we'll be able to make notes about deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and its link to climate change.

So before we write an essay, it's really important that we research the subject we're writing about so that we can sound authoritative, so that we can sound like we're confident and that we know what we're talking about.

So I'm going to present you with some information that will help you in this essay to sound authoritative, but it'd be really good if you can do some research of your own as well to really personalise your essay.

And we're gonna make sure we keep these notes from this lesson going forward to use in our writing.

Let's make a start.

Here are our keywords for today's lesson.

My turn, your turn.

Deforestation, subject-specific vocabulary, climate change, and greenhouse effect.

Well done.

So deforestation is the process of removing forested areas, usually to create farmland.

And subject-specific vocabulary is vocabulary that relates to a particular subject.

Climate change is a long-term change to global temperatures and weather.

And the greenhouse effect is the natural process where greenhouse gases trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere, warming the Earth.

So here's our lesson outline for today.

We're going to start by looking at deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and then we're gonna think about how it relates to climate change.

So the Amazon rainforest, as you might know, is a tropical rainforest located on both sides of the equator, north and south of the equator, in South America.

And remember, the equator is that invisible line that runs around the centre of the Earth.

So here's a map of the northern part of South America, and we can see the Amazon rainforest in green there.

We've got the equator as a dotted line.

And you can see most of the Amazon rainforest is south of the equator, but it spans eight different countries.

Most of it, though, as you can see, is in Brazil.

The UK would fit into the Amazon rainforest 28 times, so it's an absolutely vast area of rainforest.

And the Amazon River, as I'm sure you know, runs through it.

And you can see the Amazon in white there, with all its tributaries, the rivers that feed into it, spanning this Amazon basin, this huge area where the Amazon rainforest is found.

And the rainforest is very hot and humid.

It rains almost all year round, so there'll be parts of the day, almost every day of the year, when it rains.

And the rainforest is home to 30 million people.

So it's over a vast area, so they're quite sparsely spread out, but a lot of people still live in that rainforest.

And unbelievably, there are still areas of the rainforest that are unexplored.

So it's a really incredible part of the world and a very special part of our natural history for our planet.

Now, the Amazon rainforest is 50 million years old or more.

And you can see some examples here of how it looks from above.

So we've got, as you can see, really densely packed trees with some rivers winding through.

And you can see here the tops of the trees.

But remember that below those very tall trees, you'd have some much smaller trees.

And down at the bottom, where the floor forest floor is, it could be very, very dark indeed 'cause not much sunlight could get through those trees.

Now, it's the largest collection of plant and animal species in the world.

And there are 2.

5 million different species of insect in the Amazon rainforest, along with at least 40,000 plant species and over 400 mammals.

So that is a huge number and a huge diversity of plant and animal life, and we call that biodiversity.

So it's a very biodiverse area of the world.

And on average, an area of the Amazon rainforest smaller than a football pitch, so imagine a football pitch and then make it slightly smaller, that area would have 160 different species of birds in it and 33 different species of amphibian.

Isn't that incredible? And it's home to some famous species I'm sure you've heard of such as the anaconda, a huge snake; the jaguar; and lots of poisonous frogs as well.

So a really fascinating place.

So can you correct these incorrect statements about the Amazon rainforest? Pause the video and have a go.

That's it.

Good ideas.

So for A, very few people live in the Amazon rainforest.

No,, we said over 30 million people live there.

The rainforest grew only recently.

No, we said it's been there for over 50 million years.

C says the rainforest is roughly the same size as the UK.

Absolutely not.

It's 28 times the size of the UK.

And D says the rainforest has a dry, cold climate.

No, we said it's very hot and very wet.

Really well done for correcting this.

So what is deforestation? Well, deforestation is the removal of trees from an area, changing a forested area into an unforested area.

And we can see here a picture of an area of land in the UK which has been deforested, it's undergone deforestation.

So the UK would actually be naturally almost completely covered in forest apart from some very northern areas, but it has been deforested by humans over thousands of years.

And usually what happens is that woodland is removed, forests are removed, to make way for farming and for animal grazing.

So for thousands of years in Britain, people have cut down forests and changed them into farmland, and that is deforestation.

So the countryside we see around us in the UK, like the moorlands you can see in the picture, looks how it does in part because of this deforestation that's happened thousands of years ago and all the way up to the present.

Now, in the UK, actually, we have reversed our deforestation a little bit over the last century and increased the amount of tree cover that we have, but we still are a long way from where we would naturally be on our island, which would be that we would have almost the entire area covered in forest.

So deforestation is not something that happens in other countries, it's something which happened in our country in the past.

So like the UK, the Amazon rainforest has been subject to deforestation, but much more recently.

I'm gonna show you two satellite pictures here.

Can you see in the top one we've got some light green and dark green.

Now, the dark green is the rainforest and the light green is the farmland.

The top picture is taken in the year 2000 and the bottom picture in the year 2017, so 17 years later.

Can you see how the light green has expanded quite a lot in those 17 years? And that means deforestation has happened.

So they show that deforestation over that 17-year period.

And actually since the 1960s, which is about 60 to 70 years ago, over 20%, 1/5 of the Amazon rainforest has been deforested, it's been cut down and replaced with farmland.

And that means that an area nearly four times the size of the UK has been lost to deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, and that amounts to over 800,000 kilometres squared.

And in fact, an area the size of 11 football fields is lost every minute to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

So we can say that deforestation is having a slow and steady effect on the size of the Amazon rainforest, reducing that size and replacing the rainforest usually with farmland.

So can you match those facts to these numbers? Pause the video and have a go.

Well done.

Good job.

So the area of rainforest that has been deforested in total is, well done, four times the size of the UK.

Then the proportion, which means out of the hole, what amount of the rainforest that has been lost would be over 20%.

For C, the size of the Amazon rainforest is 28 times the size of the UK, so it's still very large.

And how much is lost every minute is 11 football fields worth of forest.

Really well done for matching those up.

So just as in the UK, there are reasons for deforestation, which were to make way for animal grazing and for farmland.

There are many factors driving deforestation in the Amazon, and one of the main ones is cattle or cows.

So 80% of deforestation in the Amazon is caused by removing forest to make way for cattle farming.

Well, what do we use cattle for? The cattle are raised to provide beef and leather to be sold around the world.

So the cattle are raised on this land, and cattle need quite a lot of land to be raised on, and then obviously they are slaughtered or killed and then sold around the world.

Now, lots of the deforested land has also been used to grow soybeans.

And the reason the farmers grow soybeans is to use to feed the cattle.

So you can see that a huge amount of this deforestation is linked to cattle farming, either to allow space for the cattle themselves or to grow soybeans to feed to the cattle.

So there's a lot of this deforestation driven by cattle farming.

Now, when you cut down trees, some of those trees are valuable.

And when we cut down trees to sell, we call that logging.

So some of the deforestation has also been driven by logging, so cutting down trees to sell the wood, including some very valuable woods like mahogany and teak.

So not all of the trees in the Amazon rainforest would be valuable to sell, but some like mahogany and teak would, would be very valuable.

So those trees are cut down and then some trees around them might be destroyed as well and then the land itself can then be used as farmland or for cattle grazing.

So in the Amazon rainforest, land is usually deforested using what's called the slash and burn method.

Now, this picture I've shown you here is not from the Amazon rainforest, but it gives you a good idea of what it might look like to see it deforested area.

So how does the sash and burn method work? Well, first of all, valuable trees, like the teak and mahogany, might be cut down to sell as wood, so they're removed from the area.

But then the other trees which aren't valuable enough to sell might be pulled down using bulldozers and tractors during the wet season of the year.

Now, we said it's wet most of the year in the Amazon, but during the wetter parts of the year, they're going to pull the rest of those trees down like you might see in the picture here.

Then they leave the trees to dry out during the drier season so that they're easier to burn 'cause that's the last step of the method.

So when the trees are dry, they set fire to the area, including all of the trees there.

And then obviously once they've burned, then you can be left with ash, and the ash can, for a couple of years, keep the soil fertile.

So do you agree with Izzy? Why or why not? Izzy says, "It sounds like people living near the Amazon need to stop eating so much beef if you want to stop deforestation from happening." Do you agree with that? Pause the video and have a think.

Well done.

Good ideas.

Now, unfortunately, it's not quite that simple because remember some of that beef that's produced in the Amazon region might be eaten by the people there, but lots of it is exported, sent, to other countries.

And in fact, the majority of Brazil's beef is sold to China, so it's sent halfway around the world to a different country.

So that means the people eating beef in Brazil might not be able to have much effect on this level of deforestation.

So in the modern world, as I'm sure you know, lots of things we eat and use are often made in other parts of the world, they're not necessarily made near to us; in fact, they very often are not made near to us.

So that means our choices where we are can have impact a long way away.

And that might be true here as well.

What about Alex's ideas here? Alex says, "People in the Amazon might not have many other ways of making money.

Why shouldn't they turn the rainforest into farmland?" Do you agree with Alex? Why or why? Pause the video and have a think? Well done.

Good ideas.

Again, not an easy question.

Now, it's true that what is happening in the Amazon, the deforestation happening there, is not very different to what happened in the UK in the past.

We said that our country should be covered in huge amounts of forest, but now that tree cover is very, very reduced.

But there is a few more complicating factors in the Amazon.

For instance, many Indigenous people in the Amazon, that's people who've been living there for thousands of years, rely on the forest to live.

For instance, there might be people who still live in a very traditional way living in the Amazon rainforest and building their whole lives around the rainforest as it is now.

You can imagine if the rainforest is cut down, that would change their entire way of life.

And we've got to remember that lots of the money being made here by the farming that's replacing the forested areas is not being made by local people, but instead being made by big companies who are trying to make money by having that cattle farming instead of the forest, because no one can make money from the forest, you need to have the farmland in order to generate that money.

So it's, again, a very complicated situation.

So let's do our first task this lesson.

We need to take some notes so that we can use these in our writing.

As we said at the start of the lesson, when we write an essay, and we are going to write an essay about this subject, we need to have lots of research done in order to sound authoritative.

So we need to have some really good notes in place to do that.

So I want you to make some notes to answer each of the following questions.

And I want you to try and include some statistics in your notes where possible.

And you might want to use some of this subject-specific vocabulary as well in your notes.

I have species, cattle, farming, logging, soybeans, and slash and burn method.

So can you write your notes for each question using statistics and subject-specific vocabulary? Pause video and have a go.

Well done.

Really good effort.

So here are some examples of the notes you might have made.

For the first question: "Why is the Amazon ring for a special?" maybe you said this: It's the largest collection of animal and plant species in the world, with 2.

5 million insect species, 400,000 plant species, and 160 bird species just in a football pitch-sized area.

You might have said it's 28 times the size of the UK, with many areas still unexplored.

There are lots more things you could have said there.

For what is deforestation, you could say this in different ways.

You could say it's the removal of trees from an area of land, or you could say it's converting forested land into unforested land, and usually, as we've said, for farmland.

For is deforestation happening in the Amazon, you could say, "Yes, 20% of that forest area has been lost, which is an area four times the size of the UK." And you could talk about the fact that an area the size of 11 football fields is lost every minute.

For the next question, we had: "Why is deforestation happening there?" Well, we know it's driven by cattle farming for the most part.

80% of that forest loss, so that deforestation, comes from making space for cattle farming.

We know that's done to produce beef and leather to sell around the world.

And we said that also some of that loss is due to logging for expensive valuable trees, like mahogany and teak, and for growing soybeans which are used to feed the cattle.

So how is land deforested in the Amazon? What's the process involved there? Well, we know that they use the slash and burn method, often illegally.

And what happens is you cut down the valuable trees, you bulldoze the rest, let it dry, and then burn it during the dry season.

So we've got some really valuable notes here to build into our essay.

Really good job.

So let's move on to thinking about how this links to climate change.

Now, deforestation has many negative consequences.

For instance, there's a loss of animal and plant habitats, which can contribute to the extinction of species.

We know that this forest is incredibly biodiverse, incredibly rich in wildlife.

So if we imagine they've cut down 11 of those football fields, each with 160 bird species on, you can see how the habitat loss could be huge and the impacts on these species could be enormous.

There's also a disruption to the water cycle.

Trees are natural stores of water because their deep roots allow them to store water and remove water from the ground.

So when that water cycle is disrupted by removing the trees, that can lead to an increased risk of both droughts and floods, so that could affect local people, but also local wildlife.

Now, Indigenous people, people who have lived there for thousands of years, often in a traditional way of life, can also lose that traditional way of life and their home because they lived in the forest and now it's been removed.

And finally, good soil is washed away when you remove trees.

Trees' roots hold good soil in position; when you remove the trees and their roots, that good soil can be washed away by the rain or it can be blown away during a drought, and that leaves the land being less fertile over the long term.

Obviously, that, again, could affect humans who might be growing things in the area, but also the wildlife as well.

So lots of negative effects of deforestation.

So how might these two people be affected differently by deforestation in the Amazon rainforest? Pause the video and have a think.

Really well done.

So an Indigenous person who lives in the forest, hunting for animals, collecting plants, growing some crops could be affected like this: Their whole way of life could be destroyed.

The animals and plants they rely on could disappear.

Their crops won't grow well in that poor soil and they might lose crops to droughts and to floods.

And they may even have to move to another place entirely.

What about the owner of the cattle ranch? Well, they might make a lot of money from raising the cattle to sell beef and leather and they might be able to employ some local people to work there as well.

So we can see there could be some positive consequences for local people if they're able to get a good job in the cattle ranch.

So it's not always a very clear black and white picture, sometimes there are some grey areas as well, and we need to remember that.

So deforestation also has an impact on climate change.

And we're going to talk about this in our essay.

So let's think about this carefully.

And I can see a picture here of the greenhouse effect.

We're gonna talk about that in a moment.

Climate change is driven, as I'm sure many of you know, by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And greenhouse gases can include carbon dioxide, methane, and many others.

So these gases, which many of them are produced by human activities.

For instance, many of the things we do, like burning fossil fuels, produce greenhouse gases.

And these gases then trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, and that is the greenhouse effect.

And we can see that in the picture.

We have the sun's heat shining down onto the Earth, it's reflected back off of the Earth's surface, and the greenhouse gases trap it there within the atmosphere, raising the temperature.

So the more greenhouse gases you have in the atmosphere means that the greenhouse effect is stronger, and that means the global temperature increases.

And that is what has happened since the industrial revolution when we began to use more greenhouse gases or produce more greenhouse gases.

So as the greenhouse gas levels have increased, so has the global temperature, and that is what we refer to as climate change.

So how does deforestation make climate change worse? Well, trees and plants have an incredibly important role in removing greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere and storing it as carbon.

So trees and plants take in carbon dioxide and they store it.

Now, that means that that carbon dioxide stored as carbon is not contributing to the greenhouse effect, so it's not strengthening that warming effect on the Earth.

But when those trees are removed, obviously they're no longer doing that, they're no longer absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But even more than that, when those trees are burned or when they rot, or when they are in some way destroyed, the carbon dioxide that they had stored as carbon is released back into the atmosphere, and that contributes to the greenhouse effect.

So we can see cutting down trees has two negative effects on the levels of greenhouse gases.

We've reduced the amount of absorbing of carbon dioxide we're doing, but we're also releasing carbon dioxide back by, in particular, burning those trees.

So it's a doubly negative effect.

And actually deforestation is thought to be responsible for up to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

So that's a big proportion.

So which of the following statements are correct? Pause the video and have a think.

Well done.

Good thinking.

So, "Trees remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere." That is true.

"The greenhouse effect makes the world cooler." No, it makes it warmer.

"When trees are burned, the greenhouse gases return to the atmosphere." Yes, that's correct.

And, "Living trees contribute to the greenhouse effect." No, living trees actually reduce the greenhouse effect, don't they? because they are absorbing carbon dioxide, they're reducing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

When those trees are killed in some way or removed, then they can increase the greenhouse gas levels because they're no longer able to store carbon in the same way.

Really well done for getting this.

So do you think Aisha's idea is correct? Why or why not? She says this: "Wait, does that mean that planting more trees is a good way to reverse climate change?" I wonder why Aisha's thinking that.

And do you agree? Pause the video and have a think.

Well done.

Good ideas.

So what's the basis of Aisha's thinking here? She's right in part.

Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so planting more trees helps reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; that makes sense.

But newly-planted trees, if you think of a newly-planted sapling, a small tree, are much smaller than the ones in the Amazon, and they might take centuries to grow to that same size.

So while planting trees like this is helpful, and we could do that in our own country, we're not replacing one thing with the same thing.

So, for instance, we can't replace a massive tree in the Amazon that's been there for hundreds of years with a small sapling in the UK because they're not going to absorb the same levels of greenhouse gases.

So tree planting is great, but the trees we have, which have been established for a long time, growing for a long time, can be very hard to replace.

So, again, it's a slightly complicated picture.

Really well done for your thoughts there.

Now, we know that climate change is already having lots of negative effects on the planet and on humans.

For example, it's causing more extreme weather: heat waves, droughts, forest fire, storms, hurricanes, and floods are all becoming more common.

We know that ice in the polar regions is melting, which is making it harder for animals to survive there and contributing to rising sea levels, which could put some humans' living places in danger as well.

And as we know, as the climate changes, parts of the world are going to become unlivable for human beings due to the lack of crops and the lack of fresh water that are going to result.

And obviously that means that many millions of people could be displaced from their homes, which means they won't have, won't be able to stay where they are.

And we have to think, "Well, where will those people go if they can't stay in the places they're in because of climate change?" So lots of negative consequences, some of which are already beginning to really take root.

So what can be done to reduce the impact of deforestation on climate change? So we've established there's a connection.

Deforestation contributes to rising greenhouse gas levels, rising greenhouse gas levels contribute to climate change, and we know that climate change has a lot of negative consequences.

So what can be done to reduce deforestation and therefore reduce the impact on the climate and on climate change? Well, in the Amazon region, countries can try to protect areas of untouched forests using the law.

So they can, and some have, tried to make it illegal to log or to burn forest in certain areas.

And they can try to crack down on this illegal burning and logging that's happening in some of the areas of the forest.

Elsewhere, for instance, in the UK, governments can, as we discussed, try and plant more trees to offset, to balance the trees being lost in the Amazon.

Now, we said that there were problems with that, but we could think about how we could plant many more trees here in order to offset the trees lost there.

And as customers, we can try and avoid buying products that drive deforestation.

So we've discussed how cattle farming is a huge driver of deforestation.

So customers around the world can think, "What can I do to affect that?" So who do you think has the most responsibility to resolve this? We've talked about countries in the Amazon, countries around the world, and consumers, customers all around the world.

Who do you think has the most responsibility to resolve this issue? Pause the video and have a chat to the person next to you.

Well done.

Good ideas.

As with all the discussions we have today, there are no simple answers here, but well done for sharing yours.

So which of the products below are ones that might contribute to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest? Pause the video and have a think.

Well done.

Good job.

So beef, yes; leather, yes; both from cattle.

Bananas, no.

And mahogany wood, yes.

That's one of those valuable trees that is cut down as a form of a logging.

So well done.

Three products there that we know drive this deforestation.

So we've already learned that the majority of beef from Brazil is exported to China.

Why is that a problem? And what could be done to resolve that particular problem? Pause the video and have a think about what can be done here and why this is a particular problem.

Well done.

Good ideas.

So first of all, the Amazon rainforest in Brazil is being deforested to make way for cattle farming to produce beef.

So when other countries buy that beef, the cattle farming companies are making lots of money, so that encourages them to expand their farms and it leads to more deforestation.

On top of that, transporting all of the meat to China obviously in itself produces greenhouse gases because that meat is travelling a very, very long way.

So what could be done? Well, the Chinese government could try and encourage people in China to eat other meats that don't contribute to deforestation, for instance.

People within China themselves could say to themselves, "Oh, what can I do to help reduce this impact on deforestation?" Now, is this just a problem for China? Absolutely not.

Obviously our own beef doesn't necessarily come from Brazil, but it might come from other places where cattle farming is producing lots of greenhouse gases as well.

So we always need to think: "What's the impact of what we are doing?" because it's not always someone else who's causing the problem, sometimes it's us too.

So let's do our second task for this lesson.

Can you make notes for each of these questions which are going to help us when we come to write our essay? Again, you've got some subject-specific vocabulary you can use here, which are greenhouse effect, greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide emissions, or emits, and illegal burning.

So pause video and have a go at writing notes, not full sentences, to answer each of these questions.

Have a go.

Well done.

Really good job.

So here are some examples of the notes you might have made.

For the first question: "What drives climate change?" maybe you said greenhouse gas emissions from human activity strengthen the greenhouse effect, and that leads to more heating trapped in the atmosphere, leading to the temperature increases.

For: "How does deforestation contribute to climate change?" you could have said trees and plants absorb carbon dioxide or greenhouse gas and store it, and so that leads to less greenhouse gases being in the atmosphere.

So when you cut down or burn trees and plants, carbon dioxide is released back into the atmosphere, and that strengthens the greenhouse effect.

And we said that deforestation leads to 20% of greenhouse gas emissions for the whole world.

What about the third question? What are some of the negative effects of climate change? Well, we know more extreme weather like storms, flood, and droughts; the polar ice cap melting, which leads to sea level rise; areas becoming unlivable, which leads to people being displaced from their homes.

So what can be done to to reduce the impact of deforestation on climate change? Well, we said that governments could protect the untouched forest and crack down on the illegal burning and logging, and that governments could try and plant more trees, and that consumers and customers could try and avoid products that contribute to deforestation.

So we've got some great knowledge here that is going to really help us when we come to write our essay.

So let's summarise our learning in this lesson.

We've said that deforestation has happened in many countries over thousands of years, and it's currently happening on a large scale in the Amazon rainforest.

We've said that this rainforest has a huge wealth of animal and plant life, but it's been cut down for farming and for other reasons.

We've said that trees store carbon from the atmosphere, reducing the greenhouse effect; and when they're cut down, this strengthens the greenhouse effect, contributing to climate change.

And finally, we learned that actions to reduce deforestation will also contribute to reducing the effect of climate change.

Really well done for your learning in this lesson.

You've done a great job.

As I said at the start of the lesson, it'll be amazing if you could go away and do some research of your own about this issue to really personalise your essay and make it your own.

I'd love to see you again in a future lesson.

Goodbye.