The Amazon rainforest is spectacular.
It's by far the largest forest on earth and is home to some of the most impressive plants and animals ever discovered, but more and more today news about the Amazon has shifted away from the amazing discoveries inside to focus on the issues currently plaguing the forest, namely deforestation and all the side effects associated with it.
Currently, the Amazon is the world's largest deforestation front with 25 fronts that all exists inside 9 developing nations, meaning each one is trying to use their natural resources to improve their development and living conditions.
All in all, roughly 20% of the Amazon rainforest has been cleared so far to make room for things like livestock, defeat growing global demand and soy farms to feed the livestock, and it's predicted to reach 27% by the year 2030.
But let's just say for some reason we lost control and clear-cut 100 percent of the rainforest in some sort of ecocidal rage.
What would happen?
Well, first, five and a half million square kilometres of land previously covered by rainforests would be left entirely barren.
In total, We would have cut approximately 390 billion trees down.
Eventually, these trees would decompose in anywhere, between 90 to 140 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide would enter our atmosphere.
This is about equal to 3 to 5 times what we emit annually worldwide for carbon dioxide.
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