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Pakistani province plants one billion trees to slow down global warming effects
- graphitezepp 9y agoGreat news, I view mass reforestation as one of the best endeavors an organization can undertake right now, in terms of providing good for society.
- cgb223 9y agoAre there any projects like this going on in the United States?
- dexterp 9y agoI think under the current administration we cannot expect the US to be a leader in this area.
- silentsea90 9y agoThanks captain.
- ChemicalWarfare 9y agoThere's a huge re-forestation effort in the US that's been going on for a few decades now (not directly aimed at "global warming") without any sign of slowing down. My understanding is there hasn't been a net-negative year in terms of the forest coverage in the US in about 25 years despite some massive forest fires etc.
- cgb223 9y agoDo you have a source for that?
- sevensor 9y agoIn a way -- almost all of the Northeastern U.S., from Pennsylvania to central Maine, had been cleared, for agriculture or logging or both, by around 1900. Much of the area is forested again, through no particularly concerted program that I know of. This is why you'll often encounter stone walls in the middle of the woods -- they were put up at the edge of farm plots and pastures. Once it was no longer economical to log the region on a large scale, logging slowed. Improved transportation and the settling of the Great Plains made it comparatively much less profitable to farm the inferior soils of the Northeast. Furthermore, especially in Pennsylvania, resource extraction turned to oil instead of lumber in the early 20th century. The combination of these factors meant that people stopped cutting trees faster than they grew back, except in densely populated areas.
- l5870uoo9y 9y agoMeanwhile Pakistan will open five new coal plants next year [1] and more in the future as part of Chinese energy investments, in which coal is an central element. This is because the coal industry (and steel industry, which is dependent on coal) supplies roughly 12 million Chinese jobs [2]. So while green initiatives with foreign financing are endorsed and promoted by Cricket-star Imran Khan, it isn't Pakistan's nor China's official policy. [1]: https://qz.com/949465/in-china-and-pakistans-coal-romance-wheres-the-love-for-the-climate/ https://qz.com/949465/in-china-and-pakistans-coal-romance-wh... [2]: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2017-08-04/chinas-coal-problem https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2017-08-04/chi...
- Dolores12 9y agoCoal Power plants with trees are better than just coal power plants.
- wbl 9y agoPakistan can build nuclear reactors instead. They have the technology.
- libeclipse 9y agoYeah, but they build nukes instead.
- AckSyn 9y agoBut not all uranium and plutonium can be manufactured to weapons grade.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoI suspect that will be a very unpopular opinion around here.
- scarmig 9y ago
- runeks 9y agoThat ought to do it. Seriously though, anyone care to do the math on the impact of 1bn trees wrt. CO2 absorption? Would be interesting to know how it compares to how much we need to remove to get back to historical levels.
- aidenn0 9y agoThe first estimate google found for carbon fixing is new growth fixes ~0.7 lbs/tree-year and old-growth is ~1.5lbs/tree-year[1]. So 0.7 billion pounds, or ~300k tonnes of C/year Global carbon emissions are around 10 billion tonnes annually so that's about .003% of annual emissions. 1: http://sustainability.tufts.edu/carbon-sequestration/ http://sustainability.tufts.edu/carbon-sequestration/ (note that the per-tree is CO2 weight, not C weight)
- sqeaky 9y agoSo put another way if every country (~200) planted this many trees it would capture about half a percent of the carbon we release each year. That really puts into perspective how much carbon is trapped in fossil fuel reserves for me. Put another way a few companies can dig so much carbon out of the ground the that they could outdo 195 countries each planting a billion trees by 200 fold.
- sliverstorm 9y agoWell, coal is in a very real sense concentrated trees, accumulated over massive timescales. So it isn't terribly strange that a handful of decade's worth of trees couldn't offset that.
- sqeaky 9y agoYou are totally correct, but it violates the intuition of many people.
- hinkley 9y agoBut small trees tend to die, so a better measure is by area planted. Internet is telling me trees fix about 7.7g/m²/d of CO2 (not carbon) and Pakistan has planted about 350k hectares. So that's about 4.6 million tons of CO2 per year once established. Edit to add: There is some hope though, as there are some people trying to work out the carbon fixation in the soil, indirectly caused by the trees, which might boost the numbers for healthy forests substantially over tree farms.
- hacker_9 9y agoHow long does it take a tree to grow into something that substantially effects carbon counts in the atmosphere? 1 year? 10 years?
- sp332 9y agoThey take carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, so they are most effective when they are young. When they die they tend to release most of it, but an established old-growth forest in China was estimated to sequester 9 tons of carbon per hectare per year. http://www.co2science.org/articles/V14/N15/EDIT.php http://www.co2science.org/articles/V14/N15/EDIT.php
- jbattle 9y agoI thought that the defining attribute of an old-growth forest is that it is in relative stasis in terms of the distribution of trees (i.e. in carbon balance)
- sp332 9y agoThe article claims that it caused some recalculation in sequestration models. Here is the original paper and some discussion from the peer review. https://www.clim-past.net/7/685/2011/cp-7-685-2011-discussion.html https://www.clim-past.net/7/685/2011/cp-7-685-2011-discussio...
- anotherbrownguy 9y agoIn fact, only growing trees have significant net absorption of CO2. Older trees, specially the non-fruit bearing kind, have negligible net CO2 absorption. Cutting down old trees may not be good for the ecosystem, but it is great for CO2 absorption, as long as something else is planted in its place, preferably a very fast growing tree.
- sp332 9y agoOlder trees are still growing, for example you can still count rings to estimate how old a tree is.
- todd8 9y agoI'm a bit confused by this effort. Isn't the idea that it isn't really next year or the next decade that we are worried about, but instead it is the long term impact of increasing CO2 on the environment that is the real problem. CO2 added to the atmosphere from underground sources increases the net CO2 (for centuries); trees just move it temporarily from the atmosphere to the tree and then from the tree back to the atmosphere once the tree dies (through the process of decay or burning). Of course, using the timber for construction or paper or whatever keeps the CO2 from returning to the atmosphere longer, but eventually it ends up back in the atmosphere. At steady state the trees are dying and rotting at the same rate the the forest is growing. Naturally, its a good thing that while the forest is growing it slows the overall rate of increase in CO2; perhaps having some number of decades of a tiny bit of our CO2 absorbed is a useful stopgap on the way to a world where we stop burning hydrocarbons pulled from under the earth. However, this isn't in any way a solution for the long term. It seems unlikely that the world will utilize less energy in the future so the solution would seem to involve right away (1) moving from coal to natural gas (cuts CO2 generation in half for the same energy output) and as soon as possible (2) moving from all hydrocarbons to nuclear, solar, and wind.
- genev 9y ago> trees just move it temporarily from the atmosphere to the tree and then from the tree back to the atmosphere once the tree dies (through the process of decay or burning). Your point stands, but if the trees are used for construction or carpentry, it would move the CO2 release quite a long time away from now. Cutting down old trees, using them efficiently (not burning them), and planting new ones works well to sequester carbon for a long time.
- noselasd 9y agoIf you maintain the forest, that is re-plant trees that die - which the forest will normally do itself once it is established, it is isn't temporarily. It will be a buffer for CO2 that is bound in the forest as long as that forest stands, which could be for many, many millennia. Not everything will be released back to the atmosphere either, the forest will establish soil that will also bind a lot of carbon.
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- DaggerDagger 9y agoAnybody who is interested in the numbers on this should checkout the work being done at drawdown.org. Afforestation is ranked #15 out of a list of solutions to reduce the carbon content of our atmosphere and reduce global warming. They have models and data if you want. http://www.drawdown.org/solutions/land-use/afforestation http://www.drawdown.org/solutions/land-use/afforestation
- nickfogle 9y agoMeanwhile Russia is resurrecting the Wooly Mammoth to knock down trees in an effort to slow global warming. http://a16z.com/2017/07/17/pleistocenepark-geoengineering-rewilding-iceagebiome/ http://a16z.com/2017/07/17/pleistocenepark-geoengineering-re...
- igravious 9y agoAny picture of some of these billion trees? We get a picture of Imran Khan but I already know what he looks like :)
- fahizzled 9y agoHere ya go: https://www.voanews.com/a/one-billion-trees-planted-in-pakistan-nw-province/3983609.html https://www.voanews.com/a/one-billion-trees-planted-in-pakis... This article has both
- igravious 9y agoThank you random internet benefactor. I didn't notice/follow the link at the end of the story. Is that really four years of growth? Doesn't look like both photos are taken from the same place. (Also – confession time. I thought Punjab was in India, turns out part of it is in Pakistan. Shows my shocking geographical skillz.)
- carapace 9y agoCheers! That seems like a much better article.
- HillaryBriss 9y agoi remember when former LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa advocated a goal of planting another 1 million trees. never reached it. too much water was required. with global warning and frequent droughts, the thinking is now that LA is a "post oasis" landscape.
- 2paisay 9y agoOne billion trees in 4 years is like 28,000 trees per hour. Seems a bit far fetched.
- sliverstorm 9y agoI feel like I should point out that reforestation has a lot of value outside of carbon sequestration. Even if trees don't fix our carbon emissions by themselves, they help. Forests also: - Increase biodiversity - Improve air quality - Reverse desertification - Provide sustainable wood supply (with good management) - Reduces erosion, landslides, and floods They won't solve global warming, but they help- along with all the other positives, to boot.
- DougN7 9y agoDo these numbers seem implausible to anyone else? A billion trees in two years is 1.3 million trees per day. 57,000 trees per hour, non-stop for 24 hours per day. Seems unlikely.
- vitro 9y agoIt's doable, 66 million per 12 hours is 5.5 million per hour, more than 1.5 million of volunteers. Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-05/india-breaks-record-planting-66-million-trees-in-12-hours/8677302 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-05/india-breaks-record-pl...
- tlb 9y agoA billion trees sounds like a lot. >>> sqrt(1e9) 31622.776601683792 # trees on a side >>> 31623*4/5280 # assume they're planted on 4' centers 23.956818181818182 # miles square So like a medium US national park. A decent contribution.