RAINFOREST FACTS

Here are some interesting rainforest facts, brought to you by Paradise Earth.

• Collectively rainforests harbor the single greatest repository of biological diversity: plants, animals and microorganisms.
• Rainforests effect climate change, are a source of useful medicine, and provide a living library with untold numbers of species with the potential to advance the life sciences.
• There are two major types of rainforest: temperate rainforests and tropical rainforests.
• Fifty-Seven percent of the world’s forests, including most tropical forests, are located in developing countries.
• Rainforests require a minimum of 100 inches of rain a year!
  Rainforests act as the world’s thermostat and weather patterns.
• One-Fifth of the world’s fresh water is found in the Amazon Basin. Rainforests are critical in maintaining the earth’s limited supply of drinking and fresh water.
• Rainforest trees are about 100-ft tall, but there are taller trees known as “emergents” that can easily reach an additional 30 ft above the canopy.
• A typical four-square mile patch of rainforest contains as many as 1,500 flowering plants, 750 species of trees, 400 species of birds, and 150 species of butterflies.
• Rainforests are teeming with species unknown to science. New species are being discovered all time; not just small organisms like insects but also birds and monkeys.
• Rainforest provide many important products for people: timber, coffee, cocoa and many medicinal products, including those used in the treatment of cancer.
• Seventy percent of the plants identified by the U.S. National Cancer Institute as useful in the treatment of cancer are found only in rainforests. More than 2,000 tropical forest plants have been identified by scientists as having anti-cancer properties. Less than one percent of the tropical rainforest species have been analyzed for their medicinal value.
• Rainforests are threatened by unsustainable agricultural, ranching, mining, and logging practices.
• Originally, 6 million square miles of tropical rainforest existed worldwide. But as a result of deforestation, only 2.6 million square miles remain.
• At the current rate of tropical forest loss, 5-10 percent of tropical rainforest species will be lost per decade.
• Nearly 90 percent o f the 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty worldwide depend on forests for their livelihood.
• Every second, a slice of rainforest the size of a football field is mowed down. That’s 86,400 football fields of rainforest per day, or over 31 million football fields of rainforest each year. More than 56,000 square miles of natural forest are lost each year.
• The extinction of a large number of plant and animal species looms if the trends are not stopped and reforestation instituted.
• As a consequence of the Convention of Biological Diversity, Many rainforest countries now have active programs in rainforest protection. Rainforest protected areas and indigenous areas that protect native peoples and their forests have made significant progress.

To listen to some of these facts is quite upsetting. To hear that our society, our world that we live in is destroying large numbers of rainforest each year with no intention of stopping is just cold. But on the other hand these facts talk about how large in numbers of species there are in the rainforest. So again why would anybody want to destroy that?