THE AMAZON RAINFOREST

is burning.

While the news are crowded with a significant amount of disturbing pictures showing how the lungs of our planet are being hassled by men’s stubbornness and ignorance, we must all ask ourselves what’s at stake now.

Tasso Azevedo, a forest engineer and environmentalist who coordinates the deforestation monitoring group MapBiomas, has recently said: “What we are experiencing is a genuine crisis which could become a tragedy foretold with much larger fires than the ones we are now seeing if they are not immediately halted.”

Tropical forests and woodlands (e.g. savannas) exchange vast amounts of water and energy with the atmosphere and are thought to be important in controlling local and regional climates
Under natural conditions, plants remove CO2 from the atmosphere and absorb it for photosynthesis, an energy-creating process that yields oxygen and carbon
As the Amazon rainforest biome slowly shrinks in size, so does the richness of wildlife found in its forests, along with the potential use of plants and animals that remain undiscovered.