What are Rainforests?

Today, rainforests cover approximately 2% of the Earth's surface, and comprise by far the most common type of remaining forest cover on Earth. Rainforests, as their name indicates, are marked by drenching, prolonged rainfalls. Temperate rainforests, for example, receive about 15 feet of rain a year. (By contrast, the average precipitation rate worldwide is 34 inches per year.)

Rainforests are divided into two types: tropical moist rainforests and temperate-zone rainforests.

The world's largest and most famous tropical rainforest is in the Amazon River basin of South America, but Africa, Asia and Australia also host extensive tropical forest cover

Many tropical rainforest trees--including mahogany, teak, rosewood, balsa and sandalwood trees--provide hard wood that has been popular in furniture production and shipbuilding since colonial times.
The logging of rainforest wood to produce furniture and ships for Europeans and Americans contributed greatly to the exploitation of tropical forests in Indonesia and Africa throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

According to ecologists, the ravaging of the rainforests harms not only the trees, animals and people within the forests themselves.
Experts have outlined a number of negative effects of continued rainforest destruction, some of which have already begun to become reality:

• Depleted Oxygen Production
• Global Climate Change
• Mass Species Extinction
• Decimation of Indigenous Cultures

Unlike the American Indians, however, rainforest tribes were able to remain isolated and independent from outsiders until relatively recently. The destruction of their forest homelands for farms and industry has posed the greatest threat yet to indigenous people's way of life.

Nearly everyone concedes that the rainforests will disappear within decades if no action is taken soon.

"I'm worried that in a decade," says the WWF's Purnomo, "we'll all be environmentally aware, but there'll be nothing left to defend."