Tropical rainforests are amazing. Not only are they home to millions of species of plants and animals, support over a billion of the world’s poorest people, and provide us with water, food and medicines, but they are also one of our key tools in the fight against climate change.
Tropical rainforests act as carbon stores, taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and locking the carbon up. It’s estimated that tropical forests are responsible for locking up millions of tonnes of carbon and that deforestation releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the entire planets transport systems do over the same period.
So we need to keep tropical forests standing in order to help fight climate change, especially because for every 1 degree increase we see in average global temperatures, 10% of species will be in danger of going extinct.
To find out what else you can do to help fight climate change, check out our climate pages.