Did You Know...

• 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.
  
  
• 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.