Facts About the Rainforest You Need to Know
Every 1 second, a piece of the rainforest the dimensions of a football field will be destroyed while we start our business. Were you aware that:
Rainforests are being destroyed as the value of rainforest land is regarded as exactly the worth of its timber by short-sighted governments, land owners and global companies planning to extract its wealth. The rainforests once covered 14% of the earth’s land surface, and now they merely cover a mere 6%. It’s being estimated that in less than 4 decades the final remaining rainforests could disappear forever. Nearly half with the world’s type of plants and animals that dwell within the rainforest may soon disappear completely due to rainforest deforestation. We have been losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day on account of rainforest deforestation which equals 50,000 species per year and rising. Many possible cures for life-threatening diseases may now never be found due to the extinction of numerous rainforest species. Today, 121 medications sold worldwide result from plant-derived sources. Less that 1% of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists while about 25% of all Western pharmaceuticals are made from rainforest plants. It is estimated that over 90 indigenous tribal people have been destroyed by colonists since the 1900’s in Brazil alone, along with them have gone centuries of accumulated knowledge of the medicinal worth of rainforest species, and all that wisdom. Today there are less than 200,000 Indians surviving in the Amazon Rainforest when five centuries ago there were around ten million. The entire world loses 1000’s of years of irreplaceable knowledge about medicinal plants whenever a medicine man dies, and it has failed to spread his wisdom to another location generation.
Rainforests are so biologically diverse that the decrease of them can have a devastating effect on the entire world. The destruction of rainforest species and rainforest habitats is probably be the thing our little ones won’t ever forgive us for.
More facts:
There are far more varieties of fish in one pond in Brazil than all the rivers combined in Europe. The total tree diversity in North America is all about 700 varieties. This same amount can be found in one particular 25 acre plot in Borneo. More types of birds are simply in a Peruvian rainforest reserve in comparison to each of the Usa. Forty-three different types of ants put together within a single tree in Peru. The volume of different fish species in the entire Atlantic is surpassed with the variety of species of fish inside Amazon river alone.
Today, rainforests occupy only 2 percent of the entire Earth’s surface and 6 % with the world’s land surface, yet these remaining lush rainforests support over 1 / 2 of our planet’s wild plants and trees and one-half from the world’s wildlife. Hundreds and maybe thousands of those rainforest species are being extinguished before they’ve even been identified, significantly less identified and studied.
We should stop destroying the rainforest. These facts concerning the rainforest are very important. It is crucial that people learn all we can easily about rainforests before humanity makes an irreversible mistake. Roughly 90 percent of most rainforest ecosystems is going to be destroyed by 2020 if deforestation continues with the current rate. There’s no additional time.
For more information – rainforest facts and Amazon Rainforest Facts