Background Since the Industrial Revolution, there has been an increase in globalization and this is most notably characterized by the advancement of technology, reduction of transportation costs, international communication, and the integration of financial markets. These developments have coincided with a drastic increase in the consumption of our world's natural resources including fisheries, freshwater and forests. Regarding the trend of deforestation; Imagine a time-lapse film of the Earth taken from space. Play back the last 10,000 years sped up so that a millennium passes every minute. For more than seven of the ten minutes, the screen displays what looks like a still photograph: the blue planet Earth, its lands swathed in a mantle of trees. Forests cover 34% of the land. {…} After seven and a half minutes, the land around Athens and the tiny islands of the Aegean Sea lose their forest. {…} At nine minutes - 1,000 years ago - the mantle grows threadbare in scattered parts of Europe, Central America, China and India. Then 12 seconds from the end, two centuries ago, the thinning spreads, leaving parts of Europe and China bare. Six seconds from the end, one century ago, eastern North America is deforested. This is the Industrial Revolution. Little else appears to have changed. Forests cover 32 percent of the land. In the last three seconds - after 1950 - the change accelerates explosively. Vast tracts of forest vanish from Japan, the Philippines, and the mainland of Southeast Asia, from most of Central America and the horn of Africa, from western North America and eastern South America, from the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa. Fires rage in the Amazon basin where they never did before, set by ranchers and peasants. Central Europe's forests die, poisoned by the air and the rain. Southeast Asia resembles a dog with mange. Malaysian Borneo appears shaved. In the final fractions of a second, the clearing spreads to Siberia and the Canadian north. Forests disappear so suddenly from so many places that it looks like a plague of locusts has descended on the plant. The film Page 4 of 66

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