Left to right: © Chris Perrett, naturesart; © Chris Perrett, naturesart; © Gabriel Eickhoff; © Rainforest Foundation UK
Tropical rainforests absorb nearly a fifth of all man-made CO2 emissions around the world, which helps greatly to minimise the effects of climate change. However, these same rainforests are currently being destroyed at the rate of an area the size of a football pitch every four seconds.
To make matters worse, when the rainforests are burnt down – to clear land for commercial farming or mining, for example – they release all the CO2 that they have stored back into the atmosphere. The alarming scale of this rapid burning of the rainforests around the world means that CO2 emissions from tropical deforestation are higher than from the entire global transport sector.
The Prince’s Rainforests Project (PRP) was set up in 2007 by HRH The Prince of Wales following reports from leading climate change experts confirming the high level of carbon emissions caused by tropical deforestation, with the goal of “making the forests worth more alive than dead”.
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