Explore Challenges
- Countryside in Crisis?
- The Energy Water Food Stress Nexus
- Unsustainable Fishing
- Keeping pace with a digital revolution
- Global health in the 21st Century
- Adapting to an urban future
- Educating for tomorrow
- Digital technology in Africa
- Persistent poverty in Britain
- Can the UK ever be sustainable?
- Plastic pollution in the oceans
- Natural disasters: how to improve?
- Not In My Back Yard
- Digital Divide in the UK?
- Importing goods, exporting drought?
- Britain’s ageing population
- Engineering our climate
- The future shape of Capitalism
- Migration: skills and the job market
- Razing the Rainforest
- London under water
- Concreting the countryside
- Future of low carbon energy
- Africa in the 21st Century
Rainforest facts
6-13%
Estimates of the world's land surface area covered by rainforests
4 years
The predicted future length of time in which rainforest destruction alone will release more carbon into the atmosphere than every flight from the dawn of aviation until 2025
Source: The Stern Report 2006
1 in 4
The number of purchases from pharmacies, in countries such as Britain, that contain an active ingredient derived from a tropical forest species
Source: Rainforest Foundation
17%
Global emissions that forestry produces - this is more than the global transport sector
Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
$12 trillion
Estimated total damage cost of forest loss for the global economy
Source: Eliasch Report, October 2008
200
The number of tree species found in a single hectare of rainforest
Source: Rainforest Foundation
Size of England
The estimated area of forest to be lost every year
Source: Oxfam
20-30%
Estimates of the amount of the world's fresh water that is contained in rainforests
Comments
- Brooke said
- 27th March, 2009 at 5:22pm
- Caroline said
- 1st April, 2009 at 2:12pm
I never knew it was this bad… The poor rainforests!!
- Catherine said
- 8th May, 2009 at 12:52pm
I cant believe what we are doing did you know that 70% of our cures for deadly dideases come from the rainforest.
- Louis said
- 21st May, 2009 at 1:35pm
OMG the size of england! thats so bad
I really hate what we are doing to the Rainforest.! It isn’t good at all and we all need to stop! I never really noticed how bad it really was, till I got stuck with a project on the Rainforest in school. We cut down so many trees, while animals live in them. I wander how the people who are cutting down the trees would like us to cut down their home. I bet they wouldn’t!