All over the world, forests are safeguarding the health of the planet itself. They do this by protecting the soil, providing water and regulating the climate. Trees bind soil to mountain-sides. Hills where treesAll over the world, forests are safeguarding the health of the planet itself. They do this by protecting the soil, providing water and regulating the climate. Trees bind soil to mountainsides. Hills where the trees have been felled lose 500 times as much soil a year as those with trees. Trees catch and store rainwater. Their leaves break the impact of the rains, robbing them of their destructive power. The roots of trees allow the water to go into the soil, which gradually releases it to flow down rivers and refill ground-water reserves. Where there are no trees, the rains run in sheets of water off the land, carrying the soil with them. Land covered with trees and other plants absorbs 20 times more rainwater than bare earth. As they grow, trees absorb carbon dioxide, the main cause of the "greenhouse effect" , which threatens irreversibly to change the world's climate. Together, the world's trees, plants and soils contain three times as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere. The world's forests contain the vast majority of its animal and plant species. The tropical rainforests alone have well over half of them, even though they cover only about 6% of the Earth's land surface.
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