Chapter 7. Counting The Cost
Deforestation to recession
The extent to which 2014 drought was a factor leading to recession in Brazil is covered in this piece carried by The Wall Street Daily http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2015/02/19/brazil-drought-economy-commodities/.
Antonio Nobre, climatologist and Amazon expert warns in this piece published in the New York Times in 2015 how if 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest is cleared it could lead to prolonged drought https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/deforestation-and-drought.html.
South Dakota: farmlands watered by rainforests
My firsthand account of the farmlands of the Northern Great Plains in South Dakota come from a visit I made there in September 2016.
The green shields: how rainforests protect people from extreme weather
The loss of mangroves around the coast of Haiti is one of the issues relevant to this part of the book covered in this paper from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund http://www.cepf.net/where_we_work/regions/caribbeanislands/ecosystem_pro...
The beneficial effects of mangroves for coastal protection are covered in this paper by McIvor et al. ‘Storm Surge Reduction by Mangroves’ https://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationPractices/Marine/crr/library/Documents/storm-surge-reduction-by-mangroves-report.pdf.
The extent to which deforestation makes the effects of extreme weather more likely is covered by Corey Bradshaw et al.’s 2007 paper ‘Global evidence that deforestation amplifies flood risk and severity in the developing world’ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2007.01446.x/abstract.
Wildlife wipe out
The role of scatter-hoarding rodents, especially agoutis, in making up for the lost seed dispersing activities of now extinct mega-fauna is covered in this paper from Patrick Jansen et al ‘Thieving rodents as substitute dispersers of megafaunal seeds’ http://www.pnas.org/content/109/31/12610.full.pdf.
For a source on the effects of forest fragmentation on biodiversity in the Amazon see this paper from David Biello https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fragmentation-quickly-des/.