Alex_Krycek Posted July 5, 2019 Posted July 5, 2019 (edited) With all the gloom and doom surrounding global warming, sometimes there's a sliver of good news. Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas. The analysis found there are 1.7bn hectares of treeless land on which 1.2tn native tree saplings would naturally grow. That area is about 11% of all land and equivalent to the size of the US and China combined. Tropical areas could have 100% tree cover, while others would be more sparsely covered, meaning that on average about half the area would be under tree canopy. “This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” said Prof Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who led the research. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.” Tree planting is “a climate change solution that doesn’t require President Trump to immediately start believing in climate change, or scientists to come up with technological solutions to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere”, Crowther said. “It is available now, it is the cheapest one possible and every one of us can get involved.” Now, if indoor vertical farming can be mastered along with synthetic food production, there might be hope for the Earth yet. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/04/planting-billions-trees-best-tackle-climate-crisis-scientists-canopy-emissions Edited July 5, 2019 by Alex_Krycek
dimreepr Posted July 5, 2019 Posted July 5, 2019 Hope springs eternal but... https://time.com/4019277/trees-humans-deforestation/ Quote People cut down 15 billion trees each year and the global tree count has fallen by 46% since the beginning of human civilization.
Strange Posted July 5, 2019 Posted July 5, 2019 1 hour ago, dimreepr said: Hope springs eternal but... https://time.com/4019277/trees-humans-deforestation/ On the other hand, Costa Rica has doubled its rainforest in the last 30 years (and switched completely renewable resources for electricity) https://www.intelligentliving.co/costa-rica-forest-cover/
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