Although tropical rainforests cover less than 7% of the
Earth's surface they are home to 50% of all living species on Earth.
According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), overall tropical deforestation rates this decade are 8.5 percent higher than during the 1990s. While this figure pertains to all forests in the world’s tropics, researchers believe the loss of primary tropical rainforest—the wildest and most diverse swaths—has increased by as much as 25 percent since the 1990s.
From Scientific American - "Measuring the Daily Destruction of the World's Rainforests"
The Biodiversity of the Rainforest