About this site
Providing tropical forest news, statistics, photos, and information, rainforests.mongabay.com is the world's most popular rainforest site. [more]
A Problem
with GDP as a Measure of National Economic Health
GDP, Gross Domestic Product, is the one of the most widely used indicators of the national economy. GDP is the
annual aggregate production of all goods and services in a country. One problem with GDP is that it does not necessarily
indicate the economic well-being of a country since activities that are detrimental to the long-term economy (like
deforestation, strip mining, over-fishing, murders, terrorism) increase today's GDP. Therefore environmental degradation
is rarely accounted for in GDP calculations. For example, the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill showed up as a net
economic gain in the US because of the expenditures associated with the clean-up effort. These expenditures outweighed
the eleven million gallons of oil spilled into Alaskan waters.
Continued: Saving rainforests
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"Rainforest" is used interchangeably with "rain forest" on this site. Same for "rainforests" and "rain forests". "Jungle" is generally not used.
Recent news
Amazon deforestation rate falls to lowest on record (8/10/2007) Deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon for the previous year were the lowest on record, according to preliminary figures released by INPE, Brazil's National Institute of Space Research.
Lowland rainforest less diverse than previously thought (8/9/2007) While rainforests are the world's libraries of biodiversity, species richness may be more evenly distributed in some forests than in others, reports an extensive new study by an international team of entomologists and botanists. The work, published in the current issue of the journal Nature, has important implications for forest management and conservation strategies.
Experts: parks effectively protect rainforest in Peru (8/9/2007) High-resolution satellite monitoring of the Amazon rainforest in Peru shows that land-use and conservation policies have had a measurable impact on deforestation rates. The research is published in the August 9, 2007, on-line edition of Science Express.
