deforestation

From deforest + -ation. First attested in 1870.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /dɪˌfɒɹɪsˈteɪʃən/, /ˌdiːfɒɹɪsˈteɪʃən/

• Audio (Southern England):

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• Rhymes: -eɪʃən

deforestation (countable and uncountable, plural deforestations)

1. The process of destroying a forest and replacing it with something else, especially with an agricultural system.

   Antonyms: afforestation, reforestation

   • 2006, Edwin Black, chapter 2, in Internal Combustion‎^[1]:

     Buried within the Mediterranean littoral are some seventy to ninety million tons of slag from ancient smelting, about a third of it concentrated in Iberia. This ceaseless industrial fueling caused the deforestation of an estimated fifty to seventy million acres of woodlands.

   • 2021 November 2, Jim Tankersley, Katie Rogers, Lisa Friedman, “With Methane and Forest Deals, Climate Summit Offers Hope After Gloomy Start”, in The New York Times‎^[2], →ISSN:

     The world leaders gathered at a crucial climate summit secured new agreements on Tuesday to end deforestation and reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane, building momentum as the conference prepared to shift to a more grueling two weeks of negotiations on how to avert the planet’s catastrophic warming.

2. (computing theory) A transformation to eliminate intermediate data structures within a program.

• deforestation on Wikipedia.Wikipedia