NASA Supercomputing Study Breaks Ground for Tree Mapping, Carbon Please view our privacy policy for more information. Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features, Forests are not renewable: the felling of Swedens ancient trees, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, Thomas Crowther: We messed up the communications so badly., Ive never said we should plant a trillion trees: what ecopreneur Thomas Crowther did next, homas Crowther understands more than most the danger of simple, optimistic messages about combating the climate crisis. Restoring trees to the landscape is truly a win-win for the climate and communities but we need to start planting now for new . For Nadine Unger of the University of Exeter in the UK, this is a major problem. Planting trees on snowy terrain that once reflected the sun could even turn those places into dark patches that actually absorb heat. The government said that the project would cost a little over 125 billion rupees ($750 million, 633 million) but critics claim that other costs are being ignored. Researchers have identified South Africa's Kruger National Park (seen here) as suitable for planting trees, even though it is mostly a natural open savanna ecosystem. Its up to us to make our own maps, she says. More about Adam Welz, Never miss a feature! The carbon marketplace is one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate climate change effects. For the world to win in the fight against climate change, the best carbon offset providers like Terrapass have the potential to be a strong contender with tree planting offset options, as long as they remain transparent and provide real, positive ecological change that can be measured in the carbon offset marketplace. She also claimed that if the project succeeds, it could change local rainfall patterns. The hope is that they will save us from the worst effects of climate change. They calculated that planting continuous forest on this area, almost the size of the United States, would increase global forested area by a quarter and could store about a quarter of the current atmospheric carbon pool, an extraordinary amount. Then, the analysts find the difference between the forests current and future carbon stocks (after implementing IFM). So how much can trees really help us solve our climate problem? World's #1 Fraud. Dont use reforestation as an excuse for cutting down old-growth forests, because its no substitute., Even Thomas Crowther has backpedaled on tree planting. Because of this, some programs, such as The Nature Conservancy, have come under fire because they were protecting trees that werent actually in danger of deforestation. The verification process isnt just for confirming a projects validity. Crowther says Restor is his lifes vision, mapping the latest data and thousands of conservation projects. IFM is integral to the states carbon-sequestering activity. Its dangerous to conflate restoration with adding trees, says Archibald, of Wits University, because often restoration means taking trees away.. But a growing number of scientists are warning that these massive projects can wreck natural ecosystems, dry up water supplies, damage agriculture, and push people off their land. At ETH Zrich, researchers employ machine-learning techniques and satellite imagery to gain understanding of the Earths soils, fungi, carbon cycle and forests. Using a multi-layered fact-checking and verification process is essential to the success of afforestation projects. Adam Welz is a South African writer, photographer, and filmmaker based in Cape Town. With the right support we can continue to do so for generations to come, reads a statement from indigenous and community organizations from 42 countries spanning 76 percent of the worlds tropical forest in response to a report from the IPCC. This is certainly a valid concern to consider as youre shopping for carbon credits, especially since the recent reports revealing devastating truths about the carbon marketplaces dark side. A study published in July 2019, led by Thomas Crowther of ETH-Zurich in Switzerland, estimated the world has room for an extra 0.9. Launched in 2019, the project with. Many do successfully achieve that. The study also considered planting trees on savannas and grasslands, where planting non-native trees could cause problems for local species. Even Donald Trump, who has thrown a wrench into US and global efforts to tackle climate change, said the US would sign onto the campaign, called 1t.org. South Africa has recently faced critical water shortages affecting major cities that have been exacerbated by invasive trees, and the government spends millions of dollars annually on a program called Working for Water to remove them from key watersheds and conservation areas. There was also division over how to reforest: allow humans to plant enormous numbers of saplings or leave ecosystems to regenerate on their own? Retrieved July 17, 2021, from: https://www.vox.com/2019/7/4/20681331/climate-change-solutions-trees-deforestation-reforestation, 9Global Forest Watch. The founder of the foundation that launched it, yogi and author Sadhguru, joined Salesforces Benioff at a press conference for the trillion trees campaign in Davos. However, they also have locations or partner with businesses, such as manufacturing plants, overseas. Environmentalist Sitara Parveen from the mountainous Hunza region of northern Pakistan is happy about the move. They estimated that reforestation could remove three billion to 18 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. Portfolio audit. Maintaining existing forests should be a priority, but restoring trees to places where theyve been lost can sometimes be the next best option, he says. Forests can heal on their own if theyre allowed to, he says, and these forests end up being more resilient and more helpful in the climate fight than newly planted plots of trees. Some international bodies have also claimed that the project has created around 85,000 jobs. For instance, a 2018 study suggested that large-scale tree planting in dry tropical regions would cause a shift in weather patterns, leading to more rainfall on land enabling more plant growth and therefore more carbon storage. Nature has its own mechanism for planting trees and you do not need to plant and look after them," the former forestry official said. They still think forests play a role in solving the climate crisis their skepticism mostly centers around efforts to plant trees in places they werent before, or to plant large swaths of a single species to essentially create tree plantations instead of real forests. Earlier this year, he launched the platform Restor his lifes vision which brings together the latest data and thousands of conservation projects in a Google Maps of biodiversity. Planting trees can help with both, he says, but only if we do it right. This wasnt good enough for hundreds of Twitter users, who saturated his timeline with yet more support for trees, reinforcing a powerful narrative thats taken hold around the world: Trees are the answer to climate breakdown and many other environmental and social ills, so we need to plant more of them billions or even trillions more. But the reaction we need to give to those people is: youre doing this totally wrong because youre lacking ecological information. As the trees grow they pull in CO2 through their leaves and convert it into carbohydrates, which they use to grow. The most notable concerns about carbon offset projects that companies like Terrapass support include their verifiability, how long the advantages last, leakage, and the selling of "empty" carbon credits. Hassan Abbas, an expert in environmental affairs, says that the plan to plant ten billion trees is being executed without any proper planning. In contrast, planting trees in snowy regions near the poles is likely to cause a net warming, while planting them in temperate climates like that of the UK, much of Europe and parts of the US may have no net effect on climate. Forest Atlas. 4,374 talking about this. David 'Simon - Moses' BRAVE 1904-1905 - Ancestry Others say this problem is overblown. Carbon offset transparency | Project standards. As a result the great ice sheets are melting, contributing to rising seas, and extreme weather events like hurricanes and droughts are becoming more severe. Sally Archibald, an ecologist at Wits University in South Africa, says that planting enthusiasts often overlook the fact that people are using all this land that everyone thinks is available for planting trees. The researchers warn, Rather than improve forest management to store additional carbon dioxide, ecological and statistical flaws in Californias offsets program create incentives to generate credits that do not reflect real climate benefits.. However, it does have some drawbacks. Tree Planting to Rebuild Habitats and Offset Carbon At its core, 8 Billion Trees carries out large-scale tree planting and tree conservation operations to fuel positive environmental change and defend habi He told DW that authorities first need to carry out an empirical study into the availability of water. Unfortunately, climate change is certainly a polarizing issue. The idea is everywhere. Ecologists overwhelmingly agree forests have an important role to play in climate crisis mitigation alongside peatlands, wetlands and other solutions despite disagreement over the carbon accounting. Jon Chambers. Image: 8 Billion Trees, FW TV - Medium The other thing trees do is emit volatile chemicals into the air. There are also further associated costs, a senior government official familiar with this project told DW on the condition of anonymity. This led the state to set the average stock too low, causing inflated carbon credit estimations. It is hoped that, in time, multinationals will list suppliers of raw materials, such as cocoa, cotton and wood. . In October 2019, the journal Science published four highly critical comments. About Us | 8 Billion Trees Retrieved July 17, 2021, from: https://www.Terrapass.com/standards-2, 7Terrapass. 8 Billion Trees was founded with a simple idea: if people can destroy the Earth, they can also help to rebuild it. Women participating in Ethiopias mass tree-planting campaign in Addis Ababa last June. Put simply, where will people and nations allow the large-scale planting of trees? The paper generated over 700 media stories and further elevated the profile of the labs head, Thomas Crowther, a young British ecologist. Tree planting can distract from the greater priorities of protecting existing forests and reducing fossil fuel use, they say, and conserving and restoring natural open ecosystems, like grasslands, can often deliver more benefits than afforestation. Microplastics Are Filling the Skies. Restor, developed in partnership with Google, will bring all of this research together. As reported in Fast Company, about 165 billion packages are shipped in the US each year, with the cardboard used roughly equating to more than 1 billion trees (that's billion with a 'b').. Vox. As Fatal Fungus Takes Its Toll, Can We Save Frog Species on the Brink? Uniting One World with 8 Billion Trees - UNA-USA Exploring 'culture' in the broadest sense - from art, film and new media, to popular culture and social movements - in relation to contemporary issues such as globalisation, technology and social and cultural conflicts and identities. The carbon marketplace is one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate climate change effects. This includes restoring wetlands and other ecosystems, and minimising emissions from farmland, but the biggest contributors by far were preserving existing forests and reforesting degraded areas. In South Africa, for example, many naturally open habitats, including grasslands and heathlands, have been invaded by introduced trees like eucalyptus and acacia species from Australia and pines from the Northern Hemisphere. The Time magazine owner told everyone he could about the research: chief executives, friends and world leaders, even convincing climate sceptic Donald Trump to back the WEF initiative with a multibillion tree commitment. As a result, there is a delicate balance between trees ability to take in CO2, reducing warming, and their tendency to trap additional heat and thus create warming. Usman Ashraf, now a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, documented how Pakistans mega tree-planting drive destroyed the traditional livelihoods of the nomadic Gujjar people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. In this case, it merely leaked carbon dioxide to foreign locations. A study published this week in the journal PNAS found that the most effective way to protect the Amazon rainforest might be to leave it in the hands of its indigenous residents. The researchers really did a pretty good job, she says. Many struggle because they dont have the right information.. The baseline calculations consider the average amount of carbon dioxide that would remain after a typical harvest, called common practice, guided by other forests carbon stock, or the capacity for capturing carbon dioxide, in the same region.5. Abbas says that in a particular desert area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, one sapling needs a one-off provision of 15 rupees worth of water. Retrieved July 17, 2021, from: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34560.pdf, 3Carbon Market Watch. Specifically, California over-credited its forest carbon offsets program (the largest in the world, valued at $2 billion) by a shocking 29.4%.4. The Amazon now releases more carbon dioxide than it stores, in large part due to forest loss from mining, logging, agriculture, and fires. The repeated assessment of soil carbon stocks is currently too time-consuming and expensive to use at the scale that would be required to verify stocks for carbon credits. The science behind the press releases claim that new forests could suck in two-thirds of all historic human emissions remaining in the atmosphere was also questioned. They get new lives because you know, the World Economic Forum is talking about it, he says. The researchers investigated 102 million upfront IFM (improved forest management) credits, representing approximately two-thirds of Californias entire offset program. For them, the government has taken positive action in the right direction. The fifth most populous country in the world with over 24% of its people living in poverty, Pakistan is one of the states most vulnerable to the changing climate. However, this verification process does more than provide a label of approval. However, scientists say we must not place too much faith in trees to save us. For instance, the climate will keep changing for many decades, and this will affect trees behaviour and growth but we dont really know how yet. In other words, if we stopped cutting down trees we would cut our annual emissions by about 10%. Once theres transparency across the whole system, everyone can call you out. Reforestation might buy us up to a decade of time maybe six or seven years of current emissions, he says. The public will also be able to assess the impact of their own back garden. 8 billion trees criticism - fortune-club33.com Twitter. It's what's happening / Twitter "I have seen the planting of thousands of trees in my own area," she said. So long as a tree lives, that carbon stays within it and trees can live for decades or centuries. Women participating in Ethiopias mass tree-planting campaign in Addis Ababa last June. When we asked them about their decision to do this, they gave us a candid response: Billion Tree Tsunami Programme Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Needles of Blue Pine tree. The mutual relationships between forests and climate are actually really rather more complex and not fully understood, Unger told the James Lovelock Centenary conference at the University of Exeter in July 2019. There are people at odds with science and believe that such conservation and restoration efforts are not necessary. Earth needs our help. That is a little over half our annual emissions, but they emphasise that many of the strategies they studied would not be cost-effective: a more plausible figure would be 11-15 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. They had already issued a lengthy response to criticisms in the journal Science, explaining that they did not mean reforestation was a potential magic bullet or a substitute for reducing fossil fuel use. These figures have been widely criticised as overhyped and unreliable. Make sure you get the right mix of species and the right social context and you can actually have a positive impact.. Are Huge Tree Planting Projects More Hype than Solution? Young Entrepreneur Uses $100,000 of His Own Money to Start - ACCESSWIRE But the idea of planting individual trees isolates them from the microbes in the soil, the birds, the animals and the other plants that are necessary.. In India, leading environmental groups opposed a project to plant 2 billion trees in the Cauvery river basin supported by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. Are Huge Tree Planting Projects More Hype than Solution? Others have attempted far more dramatic feats: in 2016 one Indian state planted 50 million trees in one day, while in July last year Ethiopia claimed to have planted 350 million in a day. Read more. As part of the provinces Billion Tree Tsunami, which began in 2014, the government gave free seedlings to landowners and paid them annually for every tree that survived. For example, the aerosols create a faint haze. About Terrapass | The Terrapass story and who we are. Specifically, according to a 2007 study that has been repeatedly confirmed, the best place to plant new trees is the tropics, where trees grow fastest and thus trap the most CO2. Using powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms, the team mapped the crown diameter - the width of a tree when viewed from above - of more than 1.8 billion trees across an area of more than 500,000 square miles, or 1,300,000 square kilometers. Even the UKs Daily Mail, a right-wing newspaper not known for its climate activism, has just launched a campaign encouraging all its readers to plant a tree. Crowther demonstrates this over Zoom by highlighting his mothers garden in Cardiff and pointing out the native plant species she could introduce, and the gardens carbon sequestration potential. Reforestation is seen as a way to help cool the climate, sucking excess warming carbon out of the atmosphere. Many Pashtuns grew alien eucalyptus on their pastures because it paid more than the traditional rentals. This finding has had immediate, fierce pushback from other climate scientists. Sub-continental-scale carbon stocks of individual trees in African Not only might tree planting fail to reliably sequester carbon, trees can also heat the atmosphere more than many other habitat types. Forest carbon markets: Potential and drawbacks (RL34560). "In my area people are being encouraged to plant trees which would help prevent natural disasters as well as providing a healthy environment," she told DW. They claimed in a letter that the campaign threatened to dry up streams and destroy habitats. (2014, August 29). If we plant the right trees in the right places and manage them in the right way, we can accomplish a lot, says Wes Swaffar of American Forests, which leads the U.S. chapter of 1t.org. That global initiative could help his project scale this up to 50 to 60 billion trees across the country, Sadhguru said on the panel. The project is also going to destroy natural water springs, he said, adding this could create an acute shortage of water as well as affecting the fertility of the land. Theyre politically popular, media-friendly, and often have stunning numbers attached: In 2019, Ethiopia claimed to have planted 350 million saplings in less than 12 hours, smashing the world record for trees planted in a day. Numerous organizations are facing newfound scrutiny, and the popular company Terrapass, has not been spared with many wondering, Is Terrapass legit?. Hequestioned the transparency of the publicly funded budget that does not include transport and other costs. Dave Matthews Band | Plant a Billion Trees - The Nature Conservancy He takes full responsibility for the failures, and, with a team of researchers, has been re-doing the analysis with a different approach. 1Terrapass. If a project does not have additionality, it means that the carbon dioxide would have been removed from the atmosphere one way or another. These have virtually no biodiversity benefits and may even replace something that was better. These chemicals stick together to form tiny floating particles called aerosols, which have complicated effects. Tree-planting campaigns have taken off, with everyone from YouTube creators to high-powered CEOs embracing trees as a solution to the climate crisis. 'I've never said we should plant a trillion trees': what ecopreneur Trees just got a big boost at The World Economic Forum. How would planting 8 billion trees every year for 20 years affect Earth All Rights Reserved, By submitting your email, you agree to our. Because of this, the report has larger implications for the carbon marketplace at large. Any organization enrolled in a carbon offset program with genuine climate-friendly goals would try to prevent this. But the science behind the campaign, a study that claims 1 trillion trees can significantly reduce greenhouse gases, is disputed. 8 Billion Trees - Facebook Birth 8 Feb 1855 - Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands. Probably the more important effect is those particles act as seeds for cloud droplets, says Spracklen. In particular, last year one research group claimed we can plant a trillion extra trees and remove a quarter of the carbon dioxide currently in the air. Headlines around the world declared tree planting to be the best solution to climate change, lead author of the critique Joseph Veldman said in a statement at the time. The brutal maths of climate change is that, as long as emissions are above zero, the world will continue to warm. Recent years have seen massive tree-planting projects announced and rolled out. Yet, as of 2020, the world lost 3.92 Gha of tree cover, representing 30% of Earths land cover. One of its leading supporters is Marc Benioff, the billionaire CEO of Salesforce, who pledged funds to plant 100 million of them. And a Pakistani government investigation found that at least $3 million in Tree Tsunami funds were stolen, mostly by government officials and landowners involved in the program. They say that planting programs, especially those based on large numerical targets, can wreck natural ecosystems, dry up water supplies, damage agriculture, push people off their land and even make global warming worse. 8 Billion Trees was born on November 10th, 2018. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director at Californias Breakthrough Institute, pointed out problems with the paper when it came out. 8 Billion Trees Review: A New Company with a Bold Mission Trees With Blue Leaves (Blue Pine Tree Guide: Locations, Species, Growing Instructions) Most trees have green leaves because of a substance called chlorophyll.