Tropical forests regrowth - Interesting facts

The world's tropical forests are making a very slow comeback because only 1,7 percent of rainforests that were cut down by humans is coming back, approximately around 135,000 square miles (350,000 square kilometers) of the originally forested areas. Though it doesn't take very long for shady forest canopy to grow (some 15 years or so) young vegetation doesn't have adequate ability to sustain such rich biodiversity or sink as many carbon dioxide as old rainforests can.

So far we managed to destroy about half of the original tropical forests on our planet.

Many would say it is better to have young rainforests than none whatsoever, and this is really true, but young rainforests simply do not have enough to cope with either the rich biodiversity or to absorb large quantities of CO2 as the old rainforests can. These are the main reasons why we have to cut current horrific deforestation rate around the world. Every year about 32 million acres (13 million hectares) of rainforests get chopped, we are talking here about an area of 50 football fields each minute, so it is no wonder that until today we managed to destroy about half of the original tropical forests on the planet.