100 Places To Remember: The Amazon Rainforest, Brazil
Geschreven op 27-4-2010 - Erik van Erne. Geplaatst in Natuur
The Lungs of the Earth. Known as the lungs of the Earth, the Amazon is the largest rainforest on the planet. It covers 5.5 million square kilometres spread over nine South American nations, 60% of it in Brazil, and accounts for more than half of the worlds remaining rainforest.
Home to 20% of all plant and animal species in the world, the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest is unparalleled anywhere on Earth, and includes some 2.5 million species of insect, and tens of thousands of species of tree and plant. Its biosphere also has an incalculable impact on the climate and living conditions of the whole planet.
Over the past 30 years, almost 600,000 square kilometres of the rainforest have been felled in Brazil alone. If this trend continues, more than 30% of the forest will be gone by 2050, contributing to global warming through emissions of CO2 on a very large scale.
Even without deforestation, the rainforests are under serious threat. Many tropical plant species are highly sensitive to even the slightest climate variation. A temperature rise of 3°C could reduce the forest in parts of the Amazon by more than 40%, adding further to global warming, wiping out thousands of endemic species and transforming the landscape into savannah.
