Increasing deforestation in war-ravaged Afghanistan is a major concern, the U.N. warned last week. The environmental degradation facing the nation is among the most severe in the world, according to Stephanie Bunker of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of the Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan, and the country is in danger of losing all its old-growth forests. Some 85 percent of the rural Afghan population depends on wood for fuel because no other sources are available, and the logging industry is going after shrinking forests to supply timber for export.
