Loading in and Tidying my Data

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Tidying CO2 Emission Data

## Warning in countrycode(sourcevar = CO2_emissions_tidy_data$`Country Code`, : Some values were not matched unambiguously: ARB, CEB, CHI, CSS, EAP, EAR, EAS, ECA, ECS, EMU, EUU, FCS, HIC, HPC, IBD, IBT, IDA, IDB, IDX, INX, LAC, LCN, LDC, LIC, LMC, LMY, LTE, MEA, MIC, MNA, NAC, OED, OSS, PRE, PSS, PST, SAS, SOM, SSA, SSF, SST, TEA, TEC, TLA, TMN, TSA, TSS, UMC, WLD, XKX

Tidying Forest Area Data

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Tidying biomass data

World Analysis

In this section I will demostrate the overarching trends of CO2 emissions and deforestation around the world. Now that I have all my tidy data sets, I can begin to analyze some of the data. For this section I will be working with all three datasets. The two world bank datasets have a convenient “World” row that gives me the total forest area and CO2 emissions of the entire world, combining all of the values from each country and territory. This makes it very easy to quickly look at the world trends of CO2 emissions and forest area.

World CO2 Emissions

Figure 1

Figure one shows the overall increase in world CO2 emissions, starting from 1960 and ending at 2014. With the exception of a few dips, most notably between the years of 1979-1983 and a quick dip in 2009, world CO2 emissions have unsuprisingly been increasing from year to year. In 1960, the estimated amount of CO2 emitted was around 9.4 million kilotons. That number had reached up to around 36.1 million kilotons, which is an increased of about 26.7 million kilotons in only 54 years. This figure does not accound the past five years, nor the many decades prior to 1960s, which would make the overall increase far greater.

This data represents only the emissions that are a result of the burning of fossil fuels and the production of cement. These are two clear major contributors to the alarming increase of atmospheric CO2 in our atmosphere; but they do not stand alone nor are they necessarily the largest contributor. Deforestation is a huge contributor to atmospheric CO2 increases, though it is often only considered an environmental issue for its affect on biodiversity and habitat loss.

World Deorestation

Figure 2

This plot shows the shockingly steady decrease of global forest area from 1990-2014. The vast majority of this loss in forest area comes from the human practice of deforestation. This plot shows that every year around the world, significant amounts of forest area are lost. We can see that in 1990, the amount of forest area in the world accounded for 31.8 percent of all land area. By 2015, in just the span of 15 years, It had gone down nearly a whole percent, .97% to be exact. If the total land area of the world is just over 148.9 million square kilometers, that decrease of only .97% equates to a loss of 1.44 million square kilometers. This means that an area larger than the total land area for the country of Peru was lost in just 15 years, and it is important to note that this figure does not take into account the deforestation that occured for centuries before 1990, or the deforestation that has occured since 2015.

Human development and expansion has come at the cost of enormous loss of natural heritage. The forests that were eradicated do not just represent vast amounts of land area, but hundreds and in some cases even thousands of years of slowly accumulated carbon being quickly and irresponsibly re-released into our atmosphere as CO2. Unlike the burning of fossil fuels, however, trees have the ability to slowly but consistently sequester atmospheric CO2 to create their own biomass. Destroying these forests not only releases CO2, but it takes away the ability to continually remove CO2.

Deforestation by Continent

This new data set allows us to see how much forest loss each country has experienced and is useful for selecting the countries with most dramatic losses or gains in forest area. I did not expect to see so many countries that have actually increased the amounts of forest area from 1990 - 2016. In order to see if there are any trends by region, I will select the 20 countries with the most forest area loss and the 20 countries with the least forest area loss or even forest area gain; and put them into two different vectors. I will then plot them using a facet wrap to see if there are more concentrations of certain deforestation patterns by continent.

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure three shows that the countries that have lost the highest amount of their forest area are all from either Africa, Asia, and South America. This is not a suprising result, as the bulk of devleoping nations exist in those three continents. Countries that are currently developing will understandably be cutting down more of their forests to increase development, whereas developed countries are more or less past that stage and do not rely so much on increasing development.

Figure four shows much more diveristy than I expected. First, I did not think there would be so many countries that have increased their forest area. When compared to figure three, it is clear that the rates of increased are, on average, not as extreme as the rates of decrease. This makes sense as the urgency to clear forests for development is greaters in most cases than a countries need for more forests. There is “reforestation” on all six inhabited continents, though the majority of countries are not experiencing net reforestation, which is why we see a general decreasing trend in Figure 2.

##   Continent         Country Name       Country Code      
##  Length:6823        Length:6823        Length:6823       
##  Class :character   Class :character   Class :character  
##  Mode  :character   Mode  :character   Mode  :character  
##                                                          
##                                                          
##                                                          
##  Indicator Name     Indicator Code         Year          
##  Length:6823        Length:6823        Length:6823       
##  Class :character   Class :character   Class :character  
##  Mode  :character   Mode  :character   Mode  :character  
##                                                          
##                                                          
##                                                          
##  Forest area (% of land area)
##  Min.   : 0.00               
##  1st Qu.:12.50               
##  Median :31.11               
##  Mean   :32.02               
##  3rd Qu.:46.70               
##  Max.   :98.91

World Ecosystems

When 10 square kilometers are cut down and burned or left to rot, or chipped and thrown away, all of the carbon that was held in those trees is suddenly re-released into the atmosphere. Carbon that took, in some cases, several hundred years to be collected is released back into the atmosphere at an nearly instant rate compared to how long it took to be sequesterd. This affects our atmospheric CO2 levels quite drastically.

Figure 5

This graph shows 14 different types of ecosystems which represents the majority of all of the Earth’s bioshpere. Each bar tells us the average biomass of a square meter in a particular ecosystem. This also represents about the amount of CO2 that can be re-released into the atmosphere if a square meter is destroyed and burned or thrown away to rot. This plot represents a ranking of the ecosystems that would be most damaging to deforest, in terms of loss of biomass and release of CO2. Tropical rainforests have the highest biomass, which makes sense since they experience so much rainfall and sunlight. Rainforests are also among the most highly deforested ecosystems of the world.

Figure 6

This plot shows us the average levels of net primary productivity by different ecosystems. Net Primary Productivity of an ecosystem can be taken as the amount of carbon that is being sequesterd from the atmosphere by forests and used to produce their biomass. All that carbon is locked in the trees and plants that absorbed it. One thing that I notice is that there seems to be a lot of similarity with this NPP plot and the plot shown in Figure 3.

Tropical rainforests have both the highest average biomass and the highest NPP levels. This makes sense when you consider how the very high biomass of this region, with so many plants absorbing CO2 and creating more plant matter. Swamp and wetlands have the second highest NPP levels despite being fairly low in amount of biomass. This likely due to the high amount of algae in swamps that also absorb lots of CO2, but contriubte little to biomass. For the most part, having a high biomass means having high levels of NPP. Biomasses that experience the fatstest growth, such as rainforests, will experience higher levels of NPP.

Effects of Rainforest Deforestation

What does it mean when, say, just 10 square kilometers of tropical rainforest are cut down? How much carbon is released in the atmosphere (loss of biomass), and how much carbon is no longer being sequestered (loss of net primary productivity)?

Loss of Biomass

With a loss of just 10 square kilometers of tropical rainforest, an estimated 450,000 metric tons of biomass is lost. This leads to an eventual re-release of 450,000 metric tons of CO2, assuming that wood is burned or thrown away.

Loss of sequestration

Wiht a loss of 10 square kilometers, 22 metric tons of carbon are no longer being sequestered from the atmosphere each year. The more trees you cut down, the larger this problem becomes. Each year the trees aren’t replaced, the cumumulative amount of carbon staying in the atmosphere grows and grows.

Brazilian Study

I chose to study Brazil specifically because this nation has the largest amount of tropical rainforest in the world, and has a notrious history of intense deforestation. Since tropical rainforests have both the highest biomass and net primary productivity levels, I predict the affect of Brazil’s deforestation will very dramatic.

Figure 7

This plot shows the consistently decreasing forest area of Brazil from 1990-2016. Over this time period of 26 years, there was a loss of forest area equal to 6.48 percent of Brazil’s total Land Area. This is an incredible amount of forest area, when considering that Brazil is the 5th largest country in the world after China and before Australia. With a total area of 8,456,510 square kilometers, Brazil’s deforestation just in the past quarter century, equates to a loss off 547,883.23 square kiolmeters of forest area. That is a cumulative loss of area greater than the area of the entire US state of California. This equates to an average loss of about 21,072 square kilometers each year.

There has been deforestation before 1990, and there will certainly be more after 2016. This shows just a small piece of the enormous scale with which humans are affecting our natural envrionment, and the measurable effects of such deforestation are much more severe than most would first assume.

Figure 8

This plot shows the the cumulative loss of forest area. It represents the total amount of forest area lost in square kilometers from 1990, which is my base year. It is the difference between the total forest area of 1990, and the total forest area of the current year. From 1990 to 2016 in Brazil, there a cumulative loss of 547883.23 square kilometers of forest area.

Figure 9

This figure shows the total amount of biomass in metric tons lost through deforestation from 1990 to the current year. This equates to the amount of CO2 released from the deforestation of that year, assuming that all of the wood is burned or thrown away and left to rot. Eventually, the dead biomass releases CO2 back into the atmosphere. From 1990 to 2016, a total amount of 24,654,745,306 metric tons of biomass had been lost and re-released into the atmosphere as CO2. This is equal to 24,650,000 kilotons over the course of 26 years.

Brazilian CO2 Emissions

Figure 10

This plot simply shows the CO2 emission levels in Brazil for each year from 1990 - 2016. Similar to the world CO2 emission levels, there is a constant increase in CO2 emissions in Brazil with the exception of a few years. These levels come from the World Bank and represent only CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and cement production. Landscape changes such as deforestation are not included in these levels.

Figure 11

This plot shos the amount of biomass lost from deforestation each year in Brazil and equates to the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere in kilotons each year. The height of these columns represent the rate of deforestation over a period of time. We can see that from 1991 - 2000 there was a high constant rate of about 1.2 million kioltons per year. That level increases to around 1.3 million kilotons per year from 2001 - 2005. From the years 2006 - 2010 the rate decreases dramatically to about 750,000 kilotons per year. The rate decreases once more from 2011-2016 to about 450,000 kilotons per year.

The scale of this graph is very large, so the rates seem uniform. There is, however, some variation between years. It does, however, beg the question: what leads to this clear uniformity in deforestation rates. Are there policy changes surrounding deforestation that can explain why rates seem nearly constant for many years in a row?

Figure 12

This figure shows the dramatic impact of deforestation that is often overlooked, and that is the cumulative loss of carbon sequestartion. What is shown in these columns is the amount of CO2 that is not being absorbed and sequestered by trees that have been cut down due to deforestation. When a piece of forest area is removed, a carbon debt is created due to the trees’ inability to sequester CO2 in order to produce more biomass. Each year that number grows as shown in this graph. There is an inital release of CO2 from the burning or rotting of biomass, and an impact of CO2 that would have been sequestered but no longer can be.

This debt grows forever, unless a deforested area is reforested as it is in some countries. Even as the rate of deforestation may decrease, as we see in Figure 11, the impact to CO2 levels in the atmosphere is affected. These are the overlooked consequences of deforestation.

Conclusion

Rising atmospheric CO2 levels from the burning fossil fuels and from the practice of deforestation have proven to be two major consequences of human development. Carbon dioxide is a major green house gas, and the largest anthropogenic source of green house gases. In this project I not only analyze the amount of global and Brazilian CO2 emissions from fossil fuel buring and cement production, but also the amount of global and Brazilian forest loss through deforestation and its dramatic and often overlooked affect on CO2 emissions and atmospheric levels.

Global CO2 emissions have been on the constant increase as shown in data collected from the World Bank over the last 54 years. At the same time, global forest area has been constatnly decreasing. This correlation does not mean the increase of CO2 emissions is caused directly by forest loss because the data on CO2 emissions used does not account for deforestation. However, this project proves that in fact deforestation does have an extremely large impact in the addition of green house gases.

Despite a downward trend, it was proven that some countries have been experiencing reforestation. Some of which are developing nations, which proves that development does not necessarily have to come at the expense of our natural heritage.

I explained which world ecosystems have the highest rates of biomass and net primary productivity, which are both very important indicators in determining the affect deforestation will have on atmospheric CO2. Higher biomass means more initial release of CO2 when a forest area is deforested and burned or thrown away and left to rot. Higher NPP means more of a CO2 debt when a forest area is removed and is no longer able to sequester carbon. Tropical rainforests were shown to be hightest in both categories and so, I selected Brazil for my study as it is the country with the most tropical rainforests.

Brazil has been constantly losing its rainforest area since 1990, and the total loss has reached 547,883.23 square kiolmeters. This loss of forest area equates to an estimated amount of 24,650,000 kilotons of biomass lost and thus released into the atmosphere as CO2 over time. By 2016 the annual carbon debt of CO2 from loss of sequestration ability was 1,205,343 kilotons. Even if Brazil were to completely stop their deforestation, as long as that land remains barren 1,205,343 kilotons of CO2 would be added to the atmosphere that before would have been sequestered.

While it is right and important to be concerned about the burning of fossil fuels, one must not overlook other actions that increase green house gases such as deforestation. It was proven that in some cases like Brazil, deforestation can be done in severe enough circumstances to greatly surpass fossil fuel burning as the main contributor to increasing atmospheric CO2. The amount of impact on atmospheric CO2 levels from the release of CO2 due to loss of biomass as well as the carbon debt from loss of NPP far surpasses the CO2 emission levels shown from the world bank data. Brazil is an extreme case as they hold the most tropical rainforest and have lost an enormous amount of its area. However, this project shows that deforestation of any ecosystem has a two-fold impact. One of inital CO2 release from biomass loss, and one of a loss of carbon sequestration. As a result, the effects of deforestation are felt and measureable for as long as reforestation does not occur. We should priortize reforestation in the future, and seriously question the necessity for any sort of deforestation.