Figure: Square Miles

figure: Put another way, it's the equivalent of losing Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts and New Jersey, according to CNN. The stunning figure is from the Royal Statistical Society, which chose it as its international statistic of the decade. That's about 24,000 square miles, or about 10.3 million American football fields. The British organization is comprised of statisticians from around the world. Read More Since 2010, miles and miles of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil have been converted for commercial use, including cattle ranching, logging and palm oil production. The statistic only gives a snapshot of the issue, but it really provides an insight into the dramatic change to the landscape that has occurred over the past decade, Liberty Vittert, a visiting scholar at Harvard University and one of the statisticians on the judging panel for the RSS, told CNN. Statisticians calculated that number using deforestation data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research INPE and FIFA's regulations on pitch dimensions. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.