<em>Rain forests provide important ecological services, including storing hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, buffering against flood and drought, stabilizing soils, influencing rainfall patterns, and providing a home to wildlife and indigenous people. Rain forests are also the source of many useful products upon which local communities depend.
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<em>While rain forests are critically important to humanity, they are rapidly being destroyed by human activities. The biggest cause of deforestation is conversion of forest land for agriculture. In the past subsistence agriculture was the primary driver of rain forest conversion, but today industrial agriculture — especially mono-culture and livestock production — is the dominant driver of rain forest loss worldwide. Logging is the biggest cause of forest degradation and usually proceeds deforestation for agriculture.</em>
