Tropical Rainforests Are Worth Billions of Dollars to Farmers
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A new study puts a price tag on forest-generated rainfall, making the economic case for protecting tropical forests. This goes beyond the basic idea that these forests are simply the lungs of the world.
Tropical rainforests are so named because it rains a lot in these places. But they deserve it for another reason as well: They actually make rain. By absorbing water and then transpiring it into the atmosphere, a single hectare (2.5 acres) of tropical rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon can generate approximately 2.4 million liters (634,000 gallons) of rain per year. That's enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool, according to new research.
Whilst filling swimming pools is not high on the global environmental agenda, the hugely more important and economically valuable metric is the crops this rain could water. In Brazil alone, the Amazon rainforest generates rainfall worth approximately $20 billion dollars per year if it went to agricultural activities, the scientists reported.
To make their calculation, the researchers multiplied the forest-generated rainfall by an estimated cost of water for Brazilian agriculture, which a Brazilian agency reported as around 2 cents per cubic meter. Do the math, and you end up with the rainforest generating rain worth around $20 billion per year to farmers, give or take $7 billion based on model uncertainties.
And none of this includes the other benefits of all this rain - driving hydropower turbines, providing drinking water, filling rivers used by wildlife etc. Still, “this is the most comprehensive and robust evidence to date of the value of tropical forests’ rainfall provision,” says Jess Baker, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds in the UK and an author of the new paper - who teamed up with colleagues at Brazil’s University of Amazonas, and the carbon finance program at Dutch banking giant Rabobank.
The bottom line is that the value of all that forest-generated water dwarfs the amount being spent to keep those forests from disappearing and the good news will be if these new calculations help reinforce the math behind efforts to attract money to keep forests standing.
The Largest River on Earth is Actually in The Sky: This short video explores the Amazon rainforest’s flying rivers, and explains why these invisible waterways are essential to life on Earth.
