The Water Cycle
I keep hearing about catchment degradation and the effect of deforestation on the amount of water available for drinking, irrigation and feeding livestock. It has occurred to me that I do not know the precise link between cutting down trees and having less water.
After consulting my contact at UNEP about this, it seems that trees and vegetation are an important part of the water cycle, returning water vapour to the atmosphere by a process called transpiration. In Kenya, land is an important component of wealth and is traditionally inherited by the sons of a family and divided between them. Sons who receive forested land will often cut down the trees to make charcoal or to sell as firewood or even to change the use of the land to arable farming. This has huge implications for the amount of rainfall in Kenya as flagged up in this article from Kenyan newspaper the Daily Nation.
I think the best way to illustrate how the water cycle works is with, well, an illustration. It is a closed system, but the useful water for us is obviously not the sea water!
