Emergency: saving the Philippines rainforest

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Posted by Herve | Posted in Saving the environment | Posted on 02-03-2010

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When the first humans arrived in the Philippines thousands of years ago they found a group of 7,000 islands remarkably rich in natural resources. The seas where inhabited by the globe’s most diverse communities, providing an abundant source of food throughout the year. The land was covered almost entirely by rain forest that provided them with food, building materials and seemingly everlasting supplies of clear, fresh drinking water.

Few countries in the world were originally more thoroughly covered by rainforest than the Philippines: Brazil has extensive savannah and brush, Indonesia has many dry islands, Kenya and Tanzania have only small patches of rainforest…

Cebu Flowerpecker

Cebu Flowerpecker


Because the sea around the Philippines is very deep, no path were open for wildlife to cross during ice ages, when the sea levels were lower. This resulted in a country that has more unique species acre for acre than anywhere else in the world. More than 510 species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians exist nowhere else in the world. As a point of comparison, Brazil, often referred to as the “storehouse of biodiversity”, has only 50% more unique species whilst being 28 times larger.