World Rainforest Fund Information

The World Rainforest Fund is a tax-exempt non-profit organization. All members of the board of directors and staff are volunteers. The organization is a non-membership organization, so no money is spent on newsletters. Essentially all proceeds go directly to work saving earth's rainforests. The World Rainforest Fund was founded in 1984 as a subsidiary of the Foundation for Biological Conservation and Research by the distinguished evolutionary biologist, David Seaborg. The purpose of the World Rainforest Fund is to preserve the rapidly diminishing biodiversity of the earth, protect its rainforests, and combat global warming. It accomplishes these goals by a number of means. The first is public education, which includes lectures, publications and writings, and its website. It also works with other environmental organizations to purchase endangered land habitats that are hot spots of biodiversity, focusing primarily on tropical rainforests, which have the highest species diversity of all terrestrial ecosystems, being home to one half of all terrestrial species on earth. The organization also works to empower indigenous and local tropical peoples, helping them protect their land, which is also prime habitat for a high diversity of animal and plant species, many of which are endangered. We recognize the inter-relationship of global warming to destruction of rainforests and the loss of biodiversity. Global warming causes drying of and droughts in rainforests, resulting in their disappearance. It also causes species extinction in general. Loss of rainforest contributes to global warming because standing trees remove carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere and convert it to oxygen through photosynthesis, whereas cut or burned trees actually release carbon dioxide into the air, making the problem worse. Thus, it makes little sense to try to preserve biodiversity while ignoring global warming or vice versa.