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Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- doitLP 6y agoOne thing I don't see talked about with reforestation, is that it's not enough to just plants trees. They are merely the most visible part of a forest, and alone die much quicker than when they are surrounded by all the constituents of a thriving forest: undergrowth, bushes, other types of trees, good soil, animals, bugs, etc. Perhaps trees are just handy shorthand for "forest", but I think all the marketing pictures I've seen of reforestation projects are monoculture trees in rows, planted like a Christmas tree farm.
- 4wsn 6y agoYeah, but it's not really about how effective it is, it's about feeling like you're saving the world. I'm not denying there is some sort of impact, but the main goal with things like this is to get on the bandwagon rather than actually have a meaningful impact.
- protontypes 6y agoReforestation actually means the restoration of the natural forest. If this consists of one type of tree, it can look like a monoculture. Reforestation organizations usually try to re-establish a diverse forest, as this is sustainably resistant to parasites and other environmental influences.
- IgorPartola 6y agoBefore I sign up for this feel good thing, does anyone know whether it makes any meaningful difference/is enough to make any kind of impact? From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime (threshold for headaches and other health problems). At 2000 it becomes a serious health hazard. Would money be better spent lobbying for abolishing coal burning power plants and making agriculture more carbon friendly (from what I gather, the biggest contributors to atmospheric CO2)?
- protontypes 6y agoAvoiding greenhouse gases from the outset is certainly the better alternative. However, it is unavoidable that we will continue to emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases for the next few years. Reforestation is the simplest and most cost-effective "carbon capture technology". At the same time, this restores lost habitat and thus averts another catastrophe: The loss of biodiversity.
- lstodd 6y agoNo. It's just lining up the pockets of some shady "reforestation" orgs that has zero to do with actual reforestation except maybe the name. Plant and ocean response to rising CO2 is unknown at this time. The only mostly certain thing is that it is highly non-linear. Any world-ending projections of CO2 content in thousands of ppm are wild guesses and scaremongering.
- dangoor 6y agoI recently listened to the audiobook of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. It was a fine tour of the landscape of solutions. My main takeaway is that we're going to need to do a wide variety of things in a wide variety of sectors. He gets into stuff like concrete, which is very important in growth but also big on emissions. With respect to reforestation: Gates says it would help, but possibly not as much as you'd think and he's a bigger proponent of stopping the deforestation. Yishan Wong thinks that growing forests (as opposed to just planting trees) is an important tool for carbon sequestration: https://www.terraformation.com/about https://www.terraformation.com/about
- DigitalHumani 6y agoHi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) at DigitalHumani.com I totally agree that we need to do a wide variety of things. Stopping deforestation, reforestation, less meat, electric cars, etc. We need to do it all.
- sooheon 6y ago> From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime How did you arrive at this number? climate.gov article from last year estimates 900ppm by the end of the century if energy demand continues to increase at same rate and it is all met by fossil fuels. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
- parhamn 6y agoThis is really really cool. Congrats on the launch! We're working on something similar as our non-profit project [1] built on the integration system for our browser. It will be a free service that lets you connect a few SaaS providers to start (Jira, Github, Gitlab, etc) and automatically plant trees (with some multiple). Stripe is also doing something similar at the payments level. [2] Two things: 1. These threads always go to a "trees are just virtue signaling" conversation. I think focusing on the trees misses the forrest. Passive allocation of $$ towards good causes through these systems will help teams get involved and associate it directly with their work. This sort of thing is good and feels good. We can focus on better allocation and give people options in the future. 2. There are millions of issues/tasks/sales/PRs/etc closed every day and all of them have a real monetary value for orgs. Im sure we can capture a real % of that. It also moves social responsibility out of closed departments to having everyone in teams involved and contributing frequently and effortlessly. Its exciting! P.S. I wouldn't normally share this sort of thing on another Show HN but I think we're probably 100% aligned in our goals of getting donations to projects that need it. If I can help in anyway or you'd like to get involved with any of this please email me parham@cloudsynth.com :) [1] https://cloudsynth.com/social-impact/trees https://cloudsynth.com/social-impact/trees [2] https://stripe.com/climate https://stripe.com/climate
- IgorPartola 6y agoOk but your two arguments over how this isn’t just a feel good thing come down to (1) is ok that it’s a feel good thing and (2) it can be a popular feel good thing. How many net acres of forest can we gain and how much CO2 can we remove with this per year, based on your best projections? I am not saying it’s bad to do this. I would be happy to be a customer. But how do we know this does anything meaningful?
- parhamn 6y agoKey points are: this mechanism of collection can be much more effective for non-profits. And importantly once the automated passive payments are in place, it is easy to give users other options for what to do with the money (it doesn't have to be trees but its probably the most marketable start outside the HN community). The napkin math on trees has been done quite a bit here already. I'm on mobile but I would look at the Stripe Climate thread for some references.
- fireattack 6y agoIt looks a lot of overheads for something that is supposed to be helpful for the environment. Why not just donate the equivalent of 1-year amount of your [whatever event-triggered actions] directly to one of these Reforestation projects? It saves your time, the cost of running server (albeit not much) while doing the same amount of help.
- protontypes 6y agoIt depends on how you implement the measure. In the future, we want to determine reforestation based on the carbon emissions of products. With the help of projects like https://gitter.im/hubblo-org/scaphandre https://gitter.im/hubblo-org/scaphandre or https://www.electricitymap.org/map https://www.electricitymap.org/map, this would be easy to do for energy consumption. In this way, digital services can be transparently and recurrently compensated for emissions in the long term.
- underdeserver 6y agoIt is less overhead. Sign up once, then just add a single REST call to your billing flow.
- tgv 6y agoExcept there is now a middleman that also wants part of the cash. The only advantage I see is that it's impossible for one of the CFO's bootlickers to kill the payment without anyone else knowing. Edit: apparently digitalhumani doesn't cream off.
- DigitalHumani 6y agoHi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) at DigitalHumani.com Our solution is 100% free. We are a group of IT-oriented volunteers concerned about climate change, and we pay ourselves for the costs of the solution (which is quite cheap though). Our RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) API was built because most reforestation organizations do not have APIs. These organizations know lot about trees, climate and reforestation, less so about IT. We help them get the money they need to plant the trees (1$ per tree) by providing the API for free. The API is used in lots of ways right now by our clients: Planting a tree when someone subscribes to a newsletter, buys something, refer a friend for a mobile app, fills a survey, charge their electric car, etc. It is much easier for our clients to just choose a reforestation project they want to donate to and add the call to the API in their code.
- p0nce 6y agoSounds like a neat idea to leverage in b2c.
- sul_tasto 6y agoA simple way to help plant trees is to use the ecosia search engine: https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/
- bttrfl 6y agosearches turn into trees only if you click ads: "Clicking on ads generates revenue for Ecosia, which is paid by the advertiser. Ecosia then uses at least 80% of its monthly profits to plant trees where they are needed most" https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657341-How-does-the-personal-counter-work- https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657341-How-d...
- exdsq 6y agoI wonder if it’d be better to not try and prevent global warming, but instead spend money and research on preparing for it. Can someone tell me why this is a terrible idea?
- wkrsz 6y agoThat's large part of what Bjorn Lomborg is advocating: https://www.lomborg.com https://www.lomborg.com
- atleta 6y agoBecause all the climate models say that it's a terrible idea to let it completely loose. They even predict that it's a pretty bad idea not to do a lot more than what we are doing now. Given the current state of matters, whatever we do it will be at least in part preparation for the changed climate and in part preventing getting things worse.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoAn ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Benjamin Franklin
- marcinzm 6y agoCivilization is build around the existing climate and the cost of re-building around a new climate will be very very large. For example, most cities are near bodies of water and rising sea water will threaten them. So we have to either move a lot of cities (to now scarcer land) or build massive walls around them (that need to survive hurricanes in many areas). There's also thing we don't fully control like the ecosystem (fishing, pollinating insects, etc.) that would be very hard (read: expensive) to rebuild if it collapses and would probably have second order effects we'd also need to adjust for. Then there's any health issues from things like high CO2 which would probably require mass scale genetic engineering to really deal with.
- missedthecue 6y ago"Civilization is build around the existing climate and the cost of re-building around a new climate will be very very large" But the climate will change over decades and centuries. People move, nation's build and rebuild, and crops change over centuries, climate change or not. Think how different the world and human diet was in 1900 compared to today. I think a lot of people look at climate change as a war, where bullets start flying and suddenly there are 20 million refugees at your door. Climate change is slow and incremental, at least as currently predicted.
- atleta 6y agoI don't get the point. Why not just send monthly payments to a programme like Ecologi (https://ecologi.com/ https://ecologi.com/)? Of course, if you can convince people who you can't convince otherwise, this is helpful too.
- tdoering 6y agoGood point. I think for many a monthly payment is totally enough and maybe even less trouble. With this workflow though, you can get an extra incentive to do something. Depending on how you implement it, your actions get the extra weight of a planted tree (with each push for example). For me personally, it gives me extra motivation to work on a project and remembers me that I can do something.
- atleta 6y agoInteresting. So your interpretation is the reverse of what I thought: the goal is not to somehow make people spend on reforestation (who otherwise wouldn't) but make people do more work, provide those with extra motivation, who do think reforestation is important.
- rosstex 6y agoJust enrolled, thanks!
- DigitalHumani 6y agoHi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) at DigitalHumani.com https://ecologi.com/ https://ecologi.com/ is great! Whatever works for you. Montly payments, Continuous Reforestation, donation to reforestation organizations, etc. Let's plant billions of trees.
- vcdimension 6y agoMany of these tree planting schemes are a bit dubious; can you really be sure that they are planting new trees that wouldn't have grown in that area anyway, and will they still be around in 40 years time to make sure the trees grow to maturity and are not cut down and burned? The only tree planting scheme that I really trust is the Green Belt Movement: http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/ http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/ started over 40 years ago by Professor Wangari Maathai.
- protontypes 6y agoA lot of work is being done to make reforestation as transparent and sustainable as possible. In itself, it is no problem to record a world coordinate when planting the tree and later see if this tree is still there. The involved organizations are already working with such and similar solutions to avoid misuse. If you want to be 100% sure, you need to do it yourself: buy land, plant trees.
- sixothree 6y agoMaybe NFTs are the solution. I kid but.
- BurningFrog 6y agoYeah, but how do I know 9 other people didn't also pay for it? How do I know it's not replaced by a new tree 30 years from now. And so on.
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- BJBBB 6y agoFor North America, tree preservation may be just as important as tree planting. But fire and conservation regulations can be at odds. Per my CFP insurance carrier, I can no longer plant trees on my property. And the CDF and local fire marshal is encouraging most owners to cut down all vegetation. I routinely see bobcats, coyotes, deer, hawks, falcons, rabbits, squirrels, roadrunners, quail, many species of snakes, many species of butterflies, etc (also saw a mountain lion in the area last year). Last week, a Ca biologist pleaded with me to do nothing to a 5 acre stand of old oak trees (was going to do some tree trimmming), while the fire authorities routinely threaten me with fines.
- ralusek 6y agoInterestingly enough, a side effect of CO2 emissions IS reforestation. Earth is getting greener because of increased CO2 in the air. What is not obvious though, is if this is going to make the problem worse. For one, the green albedo is often darker than what was previously in place, and retains more heat. However, obviously a fair amount of that energy presumably goes towards photosynthesis. Trees also tend to bring a fair amount of water into the atmosphere, however, and water is actually one of the most aggressive greenhouse gasses in terms of its capability to retain heat. TL;DR, carbon capture is very important, and planting trees is probably a good thing, but there's a fair amount of debate.
- inglor_cz 6y agoI was under the impression that grass is actually much more efficient at turning CO2 + sunlight into biomass than trees. But I am not completely sure, too much misinformation circulates.
- missedthecue 6y agoYes that's something I don't see brought up often. Carbon is an input to photosynthesis.
- fireeyed 6y agoSomeone should work on “YC21 Guilt shedding as a service” These “guilt shedding” projects rarely serve any good purpose. There is no way to track the end result. Same goes for donating wads of money to social justice projects. You still see homeless defecating and shooting needles despite “guilt shedding” by SV denizens. Meanwhile the grifters who run these guilt shedding projects get rich.
- ac29 6y agoThats overly cynical, especially for this project which is run by volunteers (100% of funds go through to charities). "Lets not bother to plant any trees, because there are still homeless people" is a great example of letting perfect be the enemy of good.
- mdoms 6y agoIf you want to plant a tree, plant a tree. I have no faith that these jokers will ever actually plant the ordered number of trees.
- DigitalHumani 6y agoHi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) at DigitalHumani.com We only work with trusted reforestation organizations (6 so far) and you can choose which one to work with. Planting a tree is not that complicated, I agree, but for lots of us working in cities, it is not that easy. Finding the right species, buying the shovel and the tree, taking care of it, etc. More complicated to have tens of them planted though. I'd rather send 1$ to a farmer in Belize (as an example) that will be very happy to get that dollar to plant a tree that will give him and his family fruits.
- contingencies 6y agoI truly applaud the idea. More hackers should work on schemes to support bioremediation. However, qualifications are important. For example, fruit tree orchards are typically monocultures or near monocultures, use lots of water, encourage fertilizer and pesticide use, and are rarely planted in natural distribution. A strong indicator is that, after planting, if you have to "take care of it" it's in the wrong place.
- IngvarLynn 6y agoCan people for once stop virtue signalling like plastic bags bans or estimating carbon footprint of bitcoin transactions and finally get to the root of the problem: fixing failed states? Because in the course of you planting a single tree some corrupt government destroys a whole ecosystem.
- billytetrud 6y agoYes please. Better representation in democracies, and real democracies where fake ones currently exist.
- therealdrag0 6y agoDoes representation fix environmental issues? I know lots of people who don’t give a second thought about the environment.
- thaumaturgy 6y agoThis argument is never productive. I can use fewer plastic bags. I can plant trees (or pay to plant trees, whatever). I can't fix a failed state. Offer actionable and measurable alternatives.
- IngvarLynn 6y agoYou can plant a tree but You can't plant a forest. You can't fix a failed state. But You can educate yourself (and others) on what the hell is happening with this world and vote for representative that cares.
- dillondoyle 6y agoOne man did plant a forest! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadav_Payeng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadav_Payeng https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/12/26/572421590/hed-take-his-own-life-before-killing-a-tree-meet-india-s-forest-man https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/12/26/572421590/... I agree with what you are saying but I think it can also extend to planting trees, use the power you do have and vote which can make big change beyond ourselves.
- 11235813213455 6y agoWe can also think of using less CIs and automated jobs as beneficial for environment (less energy used, ..)
- Trasmatta 6y agoThis would likely be an insignificant blip in terms of the world's total energy and CO2 output. I think focusing on those types of micro-optimizations is unhelpful as they don't make any meaningful difference, and take up way too much attention. It's like making people feel guilty for taking a shower in a drought, when residential water use is less than 1%. Every person could go the rest of their lives never again taking a shower, and it wouldn't make a difference.
- 11235813213455 6y agoYour way of thinking is very common, not wrong, but terrible, why? The world's total energy and CO2 output is simply the addition of each human footprint, all industries, transports are more or less directly related to the human end-consumer. So if everyone decide like you that their own behavior is insignificant, which is true, nothing is changing, and as you know the current trend on environment is not sustainable. I don't use a car, I don't use air-conditioning, I find natural methods and alternatives for most things, and product to reduce my footprint, and I hope everyone at some point will do that, because it'd change everything if everyone cut by a half their footprint, it's like twice less humans. My comment on CI is half-serious, but I still avoid to put many OS/enviroment targets (for example just Linux/nodejs-14 is enough) and just running in on the main git branch
- Trasmatta 6y agoMy point is that we should focus on actually effective changes. Human nature is such that focusing on the individual and the small changes that each person can make will not be effective at the pushing the needle as far as we need it to go. We need effective legislative, technological, and infrastructural changes. It's good if people reduce their personal carbon footprint, I just think we focus too much on the micro optimizations. Game theory and human nature are such that we won't ever get where we need to be unless the we have effective top down solutions.
- C06aka 6y agoAs a point of confusion, what is the obsession with planting trees? With little human intervention, outside of climate change, the earth is experiencing mass afforestation. There's been something like a 20% increase in plant matter in the past 50 years, an area double the size of the continental united states, due to warmer, wetter climate and a longer growing season. Is it the forest fires that have people concerned? That's largely due to this explosive growth and poor forest management. It's been a few years since I looked at the numbers but if I remember correctly, creating a 10-100x increase in wood product consumption (different wood products sequester different amounts of carbon) while preventing all forest fires globally would offset all human carbon emissions.
- smearth 6y agoI'm interested in what people with greater knowledge/insight/intellect than myself think of the following. I think total reforestation is implausible but the native reforestation of most of the earths fresh waterways is plausible using the Miyawaki forest establishment method ( that achieves 10x growth rates and natural strata levels) and localised cuttings. By staggering the establishment of native plantings 20 meters either sides of creek and river beds so there is effectively a 50m wide native forest over most waterways you can delay the capital outlay which causes a positive net present value for existing landholders to finance the planting and enhance their balance sheet. By setting aside the planting corridor to regenerate while the miyawaki plots are gradually planted the soil regenerates so the the forest establishment can be sped up over a period of time. Because there is a positive ROI with carbon credits at current prices and the work is fairly interesting and healthy the planting projects work economically and ecologically. The ecological benefits are that native forests have a five degree celsius cooling effect. Cooler streams mean higher oxygenisation levels which means higher nitrogen utilisation levels and a healthier pH. Cooler streams also means cooler rivers which means cooler estuaries with more sealife means and sea grasses and colder coastal sea surface temperatures and less algal blooms. Native flora corridors along fresh waterways allows native fauna highways so that biodiversity is more resilient. The economic benefits are improved hydro-logical flow through pasture and cropland so less phosphates and nitrogen flow through the soil and the soil retains moisture better as the 20 m rich native humus barrier either side of the fresh waterway slows the hydro-logical water flow into the creek. Native forests negatively ionise the air so the growth rate of the pastures and crops along the waterways should be higher with less fertiliser applied. Also rural employment opportunities are retreating globally as wealth accumulates with knowledge into cities and the localised forest design and planting employment funded via carbon credits would provide interesting educative yet non-stressful employment opportunities and achieve a higher return on investment for most landholders than commodity production. We have 10 billion people coming on board to feed, population growth slows with great nutrition so great nutrition is the anti-dote to long-term pollution. People won't go backwards so planting fresh waterways in locally designed fast growing native forestry using the Miyawaki method or better wherever there is a positive ROI at current carbon credits prices makes intuitive sense to me.
- lukasfischer 6y agoThis might give you some insights about the potential of tree planting: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76.full?ijkey=OxoPlV/Tcl1Ao&keytype=ref&siteid=sci https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76.full?ijke... The study is done by https://www.crowtherlab.com/ https://www.crowtherlab.com/ a lab of ETH Zürich.