Amazon Basin

Geography projects often look at the Amazon Basin due to its vast influence on the weather and health of the planet. The writers at Paper Masters can custom write a research project on any aspect of the Amazon Basin that you need studied.

Some facts regarding the size and breadth of the Amazon Basin's influence on the world:

• The Amazon Basin is home to the world's largest area of rainforests.
• In total, this area comprises approximately seven million square kilometers and represents 60 percent of the world's total tropic rainforests.
• Amazon Basin term papers report that it is home to more than 55,000 different plant species.
• This large variety of plant life makes the Amazon Basin one of the richest natural resource locals in the world.

Growing concern reported in research papers for the future of the Amazon Basin is due to plans by the Brazilian government to clear portions of these rainforests for future development. Prior to 1998, 549,000 square kilometers had already been cleared in parts of the Amazon controlled by Brazil. Currently, approximately 20,000 kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon are felled each year. This number makes the region the worlds worst in terms of deforestation.

Internal conflict is blamed for much of the deforestation in Columbia. The country's forests are being utilized by both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries in the country's worst civil war. Both of these groups oversee the growing of cocoa for cocaine and poppies for opium. When the Columbian government actively began spraying their drug fields with herbicides by air, the groups took to the cover of the forest for crop cultivation. As a result, massive deforestation has occurred in order to make way for the illicit crops.

The massive Amazon region is currently impacted by a number of serious environmental problems resulting from a diverse range of destructive human activities. Many of these problems are related to deforestation, which is proceeding on such huge scales across the region that it raises troubling questions about such issues as the long-term consequences for species diversity, regional and even global climate, and the welfare of local human communities. Unfortunately, the Amazon is currently the site of the highest absolute rate of forest destruction on Earth, with the Brazilian portion alone suffering an annual average of almost 2 million hectares lost by the start of the new millennium.

Rapid deforestation in the Amazon is attributable to a wide and complex array of underlying problems. One of the most important involves mounting population pressures on finite forest resources that typically require lengthy periods to achieve even partial regeneration. In the Brazilian Amazon non-indigenous human populations increased tenfold between the 1960s and the start of the new century, growing from 2 million to 20 million as a result of a combination of high rates of natural population growth and massive influxes of people from other parts of the country. In many parts of the Amazon, deforestation also results from the rapid recent expansion of industries such as timber and mining, and by government funding of roads and other projects that make the forests more accessible to such ventures. Large-scale deforestation within the Amazon is also attributable to state grand schemes to promote national economic development in South American nations troubled by serious and longstanding economic and social problems and facing intense pressures from global competition. In the Bolivian portion of the Amazon, for instance, intense ongoing deforestation is the product of a perverse combination of economic globalization pressures, structural adjustment reforms, regional integration efforts, and rapid technological change that have greatly increased demand for diverse Bolivian forest products and greatly enhanced the ability to harvest these products-though not in a sustainable manner. Thus, although the Bolivian Amazon was in previous decades characterized by relatively slow rates of landscape change, during the 1990s and beyond deforestation rates in Bolivia have been among the most rapid anywhere in the Amazon Basin