Talk:Deforestation and climate change

Wiki Education assignment: Digital Rhetoric and Writing

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 17 January 2022 and 30 April 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Shaykip (article contribs). Peer reviewers: JunoBear, Magmurg.

Scope of the article?

As climate change and deforestation already have their own articles this article seems to me to be going way out of scope.

I think it should only include the effects of deforestation on climate change and the effects of climate change on deforestation.

So I am tempted to delete the stuff about causes of deforestation other than climate change, and effects of deforestation other than climate change.

As this article is titled "Deforestation and climate change" not "Forests and climate change" I am also tempted to move the sections about reforestation to Reforestation#For_climate_change_mitigation

I would keep only the following sections:

"Decrease in climate services"

"Reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation"

Then I would hope someone else would add more e.g. from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/amazon-rainforest-now-appears-to-be-contributing-to-climate-change and to quantify how much climate change is being caused by deforestation, and rewrite the lead

What do you think? Yes? No?

Feel free to suggest time consuming alternatives to the above if you are going to do it yourself.

Chidgk1 (talk) 11:52, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

@KeeLgd Any thoughts? Chidgk1 (talk) 14:33, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

@Chidgk1 I understand what you are saying in the sense of displaying to much information on branching subjects when this article is geared toward climate change in connection to deforestation. I will say that that some of the causes/processes of deforestation do contribute to climate change. For example, agriculture expansion contributes because of the construction, which releases CO2. I do think that in parts of the article the topic of deforestation and climate change start to become separated. For example, in the subcategory "Decrease in Biodiversity" deforestation is talked about through habitat loss and climate change is talked about through the rising temperatures, these two topics are now separate. They are two different issues that result in the same thing, yet this article is supposed to talk about how both of them connect together as a result of one another.

I think that either some information needs to be taken out or the summary paragraph needs to be reworded. The first sentence of the paragraph says, "Deforestation is a primary contributor to climate change.". Meaning that we should only be talking about how deforestation effects the climate. Not the effects of deforestation upon other subjects such as biodiversity and human mortality. ~~~ KeeLgd (talk) 16:03, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

I have changed the first sentence. You are right that some information needs to be taken out and I hope you will do so - if your prof does not credit you for removing info as well as adding info let me know and I will try to persuade them Chidgk1 (talk) 16:53, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi User:Chidgk1 I am glad you have already commented on this in March, as I was about to say the same thing. I've been doing some work on the deforestation article (it had ballooned way out), now I come here and see a heap of overlapping content, e.g. in the area of "causes". This needs to be tidied up as we'll otherwise end up with a duplicate structure. So I propose to mover everything that is about deforestation in general over to deforestation and re-focus this article to only look at what deforestation does to climate change, and how climate change can lead to deforestation (through more wildfires, I guess). EMsmile (talk) 07:55, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I've done some of that mop-up work, particularly in the sections on causes and effects. More still needs to be done in the section on control measures to take out digressing content and remove overlap with deforestation. You can tell that this article has been the topic of numerous student assignments... Their task is always to add new content, not to work with existing content, nor to condense, streamline, reduce overlap. This is how we end up with overly bloated articles and parallel structures which is a pity. EMsmile (talk) 09:19, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes perhaps the student guidelines should particularly encourage them to work on stubs, especially if they could 5x expand them to allow them to submit to DYK if they wanted. Chidgk1 (talk) 12:27, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Good work - it may be that parts of this country (Turkey) will become too dry for trees to grow or maybe we can switch to drought tolerant trees - I need to look into that. Chidgk1 (talk) 12:36, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I've done some more work on this article (taking out outdated or poorly sourced content, linking with e.g. carbon sequestration). But the more I work on this article the more I wonder what its actual purpose is and if we really need it. Wouldn't we be better off adding climate change content to deforestation, and adding forestry content to carbon sequestration? What purpose exactly does this article serve? Maybe it's just an umbrella article that pulls a range of topics together, by using a lot of excerpts. Just to give people an overview. But details should rather be added to deforestation, carbon sequestration, reforestation etc. (I've never been a big fan of the articles that have a title of "climate change and xxx" or "xxx and climate change") EMsmile (talk) 08:51, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

This question is still open. What's your opinion on this, Chidgk1, User:InformationToKnowledge? EMsmile (talk) 11:25, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Related discussion about trees and climate change

Related discussion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Carbon_sequestration#How_to_clean_up_the_mess_around_trees_and_mitigation Chidgk1 (talk) 09:20, 18 May 2024 (UTC)