Amazon | Places | WWF

The Amazon is a vast biome that spans eight rapidly developing countries—Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname—and French Guiana, an overseas territory of France.

The landscape contains

• one in 10 known species on Earth
• 1.4 billion acres of dense forests, half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests
• the 3,977-mile-long Amazon River, the second-longest river on Earth after the Nile
• 2.6 million square miles in the Amazon basin, about 40% of South America

There is a clear link between the health of the Amazon and the health of the planet. The rain forests, which contain 90-140 billion tons of carbon, help stabilize the local and global climate. Deforestation releases significant amounts of this carbon, which is having negative consequences around the world.