Deserts are formed due to deforestation.
Answers
The forests that occupy more than a quarter of the world's land area are of three broad types - tropical moist and dry, temperate, and degraded. The rapid loss of tropical forests, due to competing land uses and forms of exploitation that often prove to be unsustainable, is a major contemporary environmental issue. The main concern globally is with tropical forests that are disappearing at a rate that threatens the economic and ecological functions that they perform. Deforestation in developing countries is more recent, with tropical forests having declined by nearly one-fifth so far in this century. Areas of forests and woodlands at the end of 1980 as assessed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) are shown in figure 6.1.
Deforestation is a much-used, ill-defined, and imprecise term that tends to imply quantitative loss of woody vegetation. There can also be qualitative changes in forests, from, say, species-diverse tropical forests to single-species eucalyptus or pine plantations, or to less species-rich secondary (regrowth) forests. Each year, around 4 million hectares (ha) of virgin tropical forests are converted into secondary forests (Barrow, 1991). However there is little distinction in most of the literature between vegetation loss that will "heal" and that which will not.
Answer:
The most widely accepted of these was that of the Princeton University Dictionary which defined it as "the process of fertile land transforming into desert typically as a result of deforestation, drought or improper/inappropriate agriculture".