CBSE Class 9 Answered
Forests were affected by wars. During the early nineteenth century, Britain first exhausted and imported timber from the colonies, for building ships to fight wars with Napoleon. Later, during the two great World Wars, the British government abandoned all working plans related to forest management and indiscriminately fell trees to meet the war needs. When the Japanese occupied Java during the Second World War, the Dutch destroyed sawmills and burned piles of teak to prevent them from falling into the Japanese hands. The Japanese then exploited the forests for supplying timber to their own war industries. Thus, forests were recklessly exploited by the imperial powers to meet their own war requirements.