When the beautiful rainforests, which are homes for over one-quarter of the species on this planet,
are at the rate of complete extinction in 50 years...
SOMEONE has to help.
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. (NatureConservancy.org).
Did You Know...
Rainforests are threatened by unsustainable agricultural, ranching, mining and logging practices
By 2030 there will only be ten percent of tropical rainforests remaining with another ten percent in a degraded condition.
80 percent will have been lost and with them the irreversible loss of hundreds of thousands of species.
Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. (That equates to 50,000 species a year)
As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases. Currently, 121 prescription drugs sold worldwide come from plant-derived sources.
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 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.
