Did You Know? Environment and Plant Facts

Trees absorb carbon dioxide and release the oxygen we breathe.

Recycling paper saves trees, water and energy.

Plastic bags can take hundreds of years to break down.

Switching off the lights when you leave a room saves electricity and helps the environment.

Bees help plants produce fruit by carrying pollen from one flower to another.

A plant's roots absorb water and minerals from the soil.

Plants grow towards the light.

Young sunflowers follow the Sun across the sky during the day.

Cacti store water in their thick stems so they can survive in the desert.

Leaves are green because of a substance called chlorophyll.

Turning food scraps into compost reduces waste and feeds the soil.

Fresh water makes up only about 3% of all the water on Earth.

A dripping tap can waste thousands of litres of water a year.

Wind and sunlight are renewable sources of energy that never run out.

Earthworms make soil richer and let air into it.

An olive tree can live for hundreds of years, and some olive trees are more than a thousand years old.

Date palms have been grown in our region for thousands of years.

Some seeds fly on the wind to grow far away, like dandelion seeds.

About a quarter of all sea species live on coral reefs, though reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor.

Glass can be recycled again and again without losing quality.

Planting trees protects the soil from being washed or blown away.

The ozone layer protects us from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol led to the gradual phase-out of chemicals that damage the ozone layer.

Without the natural greenhouse effect, Earth's average temperature would be about −18 °C.

Carbon dioxide in the air has passed 420 parts per million, up from about 280 before the Industrial Revolution.

Rainforests cover about 6% of the land but are home to around half of all land species.

Recycling aluminium cans saves about 95% of the energy needed to make new ones.

The level of the Dead Sea drops by about one metre every year.

Jordan is one of the most water-scarce countries in the world.

Mangrove forests protect coastlines from erosion and storms.

Acid rain is caused by gases such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from factories and vehicles.

The world's largest living thing may be a fungus in Oregon, USA, spreading underground over about 9 square kilometres.

Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants, and some kinds grow nearly a metre a day.

The Venus flytrap catches insects to get nutrients its soil lacks.

Plants exchange gases through tiny pores in their leaves called stomata.

Earth Day is celebrated on 22 April every year.

World Environment Day is on 5 June every year.

Microplastics have been found in the deepest ocean trenches and in Arctic ice.

The giant sequoia called 'General Sherman' in California is the largest tree in the world by volume.

The tallest known tree is a coast redwood named Hyperion, about 116 metres tall.

Solar panels turn sunlight directly into electricity.

Dana Biosphere Reserve is the largest nature reserve in Jordan.

The 2015 Paris Agreement aims to keep global warming well below 2 °C.

A carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gases produced by a person, a product or a country.

In the nitrogen cycle, special bacteria turn nitrogen from the air into compounds plants can absorb.

Eutrophication happens when excess fertiliser reaches water, so algae grow out of control and use up the oxygen.

The 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' is a vast area where floating plastic waste collects.

Peatlands are estimated to store about twice as much carbon as all the world's forests.

The oceans absorb about a quarter of the carbon dioxide humans release, which makes seawater more acidic.

The physicist Edmond Becquerel discovered the photovoltaic effect, the basis of solar cells, in 1839.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about a third of the food produced in the world is lost or wasted.

Green hydrogen is produced by splitting water with electricity from renewable sources.

'Keystone species', such as sea otters, keep a whole ecosystem in balance.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway opened in 2008 to protect crop seeds from around the world.

Cutting down forests adds to climate change, because it releases the carbon stored in trees.

Phytoplankton in the oceans produce about half of Earth's oxygen.

The Living Planet Index reports that monitored wildlife populations have fallen by about 70% on average since 1970.

Rachel Carson's 1962 book 'Silent Spring' helped launch the modern environmental movement.

Mangroves and seagrass store what is called 'blue carbon' in coastal soils.

The Tafila wind farm in Jordan is one of the first large wind farms in the region.

Biodiversity means the variety of living things in a place, and the greater it is, the better an ecosystem copes with change.

Overgrazing, drought and poor water use can turn farmland into desert, a process called desertification.