Amazon: The lungs of our planet by BBC

[dramatic piano music]

(speaker 1) The Power of Nature, in association with Nikon.

(narrator) The Amazon: the green heart of South America.

The largest rainforest in the world,

these verdant riches hold the key

to humanity itself

by breathing life into the entire planet.

In this film, we visit one of our planet's great wildernesses

and discover the invisible contribution it makes to our world.

(speaker 2) When I'm in the Amazon rainforest, I feel like

I'm in the middle of the heart of everything.

There's like a pulsing

and a thriving around

that is just deep

and really powerful.

-For me, it's almost like being in the Sistine Chapel,

because you look up and you're just blown away

by the magnificence of life, it's like a cathedral of life.

(narrator) Home to 1 in 10 species on Earth,

the Amazon is the richest forest in the world.

It stretches for almost 7 million square kilometers,

covering an area larger than Europe.

(Dr Sanjayan) Which strikes you is the endless nature of it,

that spreads out like a green, rolling carpet

in front of you, and you realize

that that carpet is doing something incredibly valuable.

-It's far more than simply a collection of trees

and amazing wildlife, it's doing jobs for the whole world,

not least in terms of how it's helping

to regulate the entire planet's atmosphere.

(Dr Patterson) One thing that people find really surprising

about trees in general is that most of their physical structure

isn't made from things that they've gotten

from the soil, it's made from the air.

Literally, they are breathing organisms.

As these trees are breathing,

and they're bringing in all the carbon dioxide

from the surrounding atmosphere, they're storing it in carbon.

(narrator) It's this extraordinary ability of trees

to absorb atmospheric carbon and release oxygen

that makes them so valuable to us.

-Rainforests around the world capture something

like 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

Every plane, ship, car, train, bus...

All that emissions is being captured basically by rainforests.

(Juniper) Whilst the world is

spending hundreds of millions of dollars

trying to make carbon capture and storage work,

the trees are doing it effectively for nothing.

(narrator) But this wondrous service that the Amazon provides

is under immense pressure.

(Sukhdev) Deforestation has been a big problem

in the Amazon rainforest.

There was a time it was as high

as 25,000 square kilometers every year.

Now, with a lot of effort, that has been reduced,

and it must, because these rainforests are natural capital.

They are valuable for the entire planet.

(Dr Patterson) We think about rainforests

being very far away from us, something very exotic,

but actually it's an integral part of life on the planet.

(narrator) Dense, wild, diverse,

and crucial to our modern world.

The Amazon: a wilderness endowed

with the power of nature.

[dramatic piano music]

(speaker 1) Power of Nature, in association with Nikon.