Assignment:
Please provide a 150 word response to the following student discussion post:
The correlation of forests and pollution is extremely important. Plants and trees play a vital role in directly removing pollutants from the air. Plants are often seen as the "lungs" of an ecosystem because they absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. But they also act as an ecosystems "liver" too, filtering atmospheric pollutants like Sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide through their leaves. Trees are needed to combat the effects of pollution caused by population growth of people. As People expand our urban centers into the forest, we not only create more pollution, but we remove the very resource the world relies on to combat pollution.
About 30% of forests have disappeared globally, and another 20% are degraded to the point that they no longer provide climate-critical benefits. Forests are significant sinks for carbon-dioxide pollution, which is the single-biggest driver of global warming. Healthy forests also act as filters that clean air and water.
The trees of tropical forests, like all green plants, take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen during photosynthesis. They also carry out the opposite process-known as respiration-but when forests are growing, photosynthesis exceeds respiration, and the surplus carbon is stored in tree trunks and roots and in the soil. This is called "sequestration."
When forests are cut down, much of that stored carbon is released into the atmosphere again as CO2. This is how deforestation and forest degradation contribute to global warming and reduce the worlds ability to process and clean the air from pollution.