经济学人精读丨亚马逊雨林的未来

本次精读的文段选自2019年8月3日出版的《经济学人》，文章题目叫Deathwatch，这篇文章主要关注了亚马逊地区森林砍伐的现象，能让我们学到不少环境类话题的表达，于是我节选了文章的第一段进行分析。以下是正文：原文①Although its cradle is the sparsely wooded Savannah , humankind has long looked to forests for food, fuel, timber and sublime inspiration. ②Still a livelihood for 1.5bn people, forests maintain local and regional ecosystems and, for the other 6.2bn, provide a--fragile and creaking--buffer against climate change. ③Now droughts, wildfires and other human-induced changes are compounding the damage from chainsaws. ④In the tropics, which contain half of the world’s forest biomass, tree-cover loss has accelerated by two-thirds since 2015; if it were a country, the shrinkage would make the ………………………………