as it is a huge natural store of carbon. Originally it was thought that established rainforests such as the Amazon had reached maturity. Detailed surveys of all the rainforests of the world over the past four decades show this is incorrect. In the 1990s, intact tropical forests—those unaffected by logging or fires—removed roughly 46 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere. The sting in the tail is that this removal had diminished to an estimated 25 billion tonnes in the 2010s.
