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Farmer here. Planted about 1,000 native trees this year in our home-grown revegetation project, and going to spend the next 2 years making sure as many of them

Farmer here. Planted about 1,000 native trees this year in our home-grown revegetation project, and going to spend the next 2 years making sure as many of them as possible don't die. No govt subsidies or anything. Our own $ and our own work. Nobody will do it, nobody will pay to do it, so we do.

haizhung 3y ago
You would think that this is exactly the kind of project that carbon offsets should fund…
DoreenMichele 3y ago
Thank you, "God bless you" as they say in the Deep South where I grew up. Please consider making part of it a wetlands. Forests cover about 10 percent of the planet and store about 15 percent of stored carbon. Peatlands cover about 3 percent of the planet and store an estimated 25 or 30 percent of carbon. We've lost 85 of global wetlands since the 1700s. Restoring them could dramatically increase the amount of stored carbon.
- oliwarner 3y ago
  Peatland takes centuries to develop and store that carbon though. If we want to achieve this sort of thing, we'd need to manufacture peat and store that underwater. Possible but when we make more, we usually destroy the planet more too. I'm not sure we'd offset it.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best is today." For the short-term, planting rice differently can reduce methane emissions substantially. In the short-term, methane is much worse. In the long run, methane breaks down to carbon which persists. If we want to reverse climate change, we need to restore nature's ability to sink that carbon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140831 (My previous comment should say "85 percent". Oops.)
    - oliwarner 3y ago
      No argument that rice can be grown better, but going back to your call for increasing wetland, isn't it the wet that makes soil produce methane? In the same way that the flooding causes rice paddy soil to create methane, and drying it out (per your study) arrests the process. With 20-30% of atmospheric methane coming from wetlands, while they may ultimately sink more carbon into themselves, the process seems too inefficient, trading CO2 for some CH4. Forestry produces a much healthier mix of gasses. On its own it's not a quick sink but when you manage it, and extract timber and end up sinking tonnes of carbon into your buildings. The trees consume CO2 to photosynthesis and aerobic bacteria in open forests consume CH4. Seems like a win-win.
      - DoreenMichele 3y ago
        Peatlands cover 3 percent of the earth and hold 30 percent of stored carbon. As a quick and dirty guesstimate, if you multiply that by a 6.66 to replace the lost 85 percent, you get 20 percent of the surface and 200 percent of current carbon stores. It seems likely that a notable percentage of global warming is due to wetlands loss, not just industrialization. So far, I haven't managed to do a deeper analysis with hard numbers. Feel free to do a write up if you think you know enough about the topic. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested.
        oliwarner 3y ago
        I'm just trying to point out a couple of issues in your logic. You cannot multiply wetland. It takes a thousand years to get a 10m deep peat bog and every second of its wet, rotting existence creates CH4. Wetlands offer lots of benefits —nature, water management, etc— but greenhouse gasses really aren't one. More importantly you're only comparing standing volumes of carbon. We extract billions of m³ of lumber out of forests each year. Even the process of growing it, is far better. Methane is being consumed, not created. The overall picture is complex but if we're thinking about things in the short term, farming lumber (and using less concrete, brick) would do far more good than creating wetland.
graycat 3y ago
What kind of trees on what land with what climate? Why was that land without trees? Logging? Too much wind? Too little water?
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  Okay, we have a small farm in the Great Southern Region of Western Australia. A large chunk of it was cleared for cattle and is kikyu/gass pasture, and we still run a small herd of 8 head. But we're very lucky to have about 3/4s of our land well preserved bushland. The first thing we did when we bought the place was to plant several broad wind-breaks and shelter-belts with native species in the pasture, forming "corridors". Over the years we've added more -- revegetating the road-verge and encouraging the stuff already there to grow back. We've also planted hedgerows of some other trees that aren't native, but are stock fodder, and the birds and insects love them. We plant a variety of eucalyptus species, acacias, sheoaks, and a number of melaleuca's and various bushes and shrubs. This year we enlarged two of our large shelter-belts, extended several of our shade-clumps, and did an ambitious amount of planting along the road verge (which hopefully won't be shredded by the council next time they come along). It's a drop in the ocean, but it's local, it's something concrete that we can do beyond the rather ridiculous appeasement of separating the recyclables. Some of the trees we plant will outlive us, and I love that.
  - dbetteridge 3y ago
    Good stuff, from one West Australian to another. Anything we can do is better than nothing
ChatGTP 3y ago
Thank you mate , I don’t own land but living near a bunch of abandoned unowned farmland and planning on doing some “guerrilla gardening”.
CalRobert 3y ago
Even worse, not only are you not paid to do it, you are paid NOT to do it. I have a few acres of land in Ireland (not a lot, admittedly!) and rewilding it means it is no longer eligible for agricultural subsidies. The government effectively pays you to destroy biodiversity with beef.

haizhung 3y ago

You would think that this is exactly the kind of project that carbon offsets should fund…

DoreenMichele 3y ago

Thank you, "God bless you" as they say in the Deep South where I grew up. Please consider making part of it a wetlands. Forests cover about 10 percent of the planet and store about 15 percent of stored carbon. Peatlands cover about 3 percent of the planet and store an estimated 25 or 30 percent of carbon. We've lost 85 of global wetlands since the 1700s. Restoring them could dramatically increase the amount of stored carbon.

oliwarner 3y ago
Peatland takes centuries to develop and store that carbon though. If we want to achieve this sort of thing, we'd need to manufacture peat and store that underwater. Possible but when we make more, we usually destroy the planet more too. I'm not sure we'd offset it.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best is today." For the short-term, planting rice differently can reduce methane emissions substantially. In the short-term, methane is much worse. In the long run, methane breaks down to carbon which persists. If we want to reverse climate change, we need to restore nature's ability to sink that carbon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140831 (My previous comment should say "85 percent". Oops.)
  - oliwarner 3y ago
    No argument that rice can be grown better, but going back to your call for increasing wetland, isn't it the wet that makes soil produce methane? In the same way that the flooding causes rice paddy soil to create methane, and drying it out (per your study) arrests the process. With 20-30% of atmospheric methane coming from wetlands, while they may ultimately sink more carbon into themselves, the process seems too inefficient, trading CO2 for some CH4. Forestry produces a much healthier mix of gasses. On its own it's not a quick sink but when you manage it, and extract timber and end up sinking tonnes of carbon into your buildings. The trees consume CO2 to photosynthesis and aerobic bacteria in open forests consume CH4. Seems like a win-win.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      Peatlands cover 3 percent of the earth and hold 30 percent of stored carbon. As a quick and dirty guesstimate, if you multiply that by a 6.66 to replace the lost 85 percent, you get 20 percent of the surface and 200 percent of current carbon stores. It seems likely that a notable percentage of global warming is due to wetlands loss, not just industrialization. So far, I haven't managed to do a deeper analysis with hard numbers. Feel free to do a write up if you think you know enough about the topic. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested.
      - oliwarner 3y ago
        I'm just trying to point out a couple of issues in your logic. You cannot multiply wetland. It takes a thousand years to get a 10m deep peat bog and every second of its wet, rotting existence creates CH4. Wetlands offer lots of benefits —nature, water management, etc— but greenhouse gasses really aren't one. More importantly you're only comparing standing volumes of carbon. We extract billions of m³ of lumber out of forests each year. Even the process of growing it, is far better. Methane is being consumed, not created. The overall picture is complex but if we're thinking about things in the short term, farming lumber (and using less concrete, brick) would do far more good than creating wetland.

graycat 3y ago

What kind of trees on what land with what climate? Why was that land without trees? Logging? Too much wind? Too little water?

MrVandemar 3y ago
Okay, we have a small farm in the Great Southern Region of Western Australia. A large chunk of it was cleared for cattle and is kikyu/gass pasture, and we still run a small herd of 8 head. But we're very lucky to have about 3/4s of our land well preserved bushland. The first thing we did when we bought the place was to plant several broad wind-breaks and shelter-belts with native species in the pasture, forming "corridors". Over the years we've added more -- revegetating the road-verge and encouraging the stuff already there to grow back. We've also planted hedgerows of some other trees that aren't native, but are stock fodder, and the birds and insects love them. We plant a variety of eucalyptus species, acacias, sheoaks, and a number of melaleuca's and various bushes and shrubs. This year we enlarged two of our large shelter-belts, extended several of our shade-clumps, and did an ambitious amount of planting along the road verge (which hopefully won't be shredded by the council next time they come along). It's a drop in the ocean, but it's local, it's something concrete that we can do beyond the rather ridiculous appeasement of separating the recyclables. Some of the trees we plant will outlive us, and I love that.
- dbetteridge 3y ago
  Good stuff, from one West Australian to another. Anything we can do is better than nothing

ChatGTP 3y ago

Thank you mate , I don’t own land but living near a bunch of abandoned unowned farmland and planning on doing some “guerrilla gardening”.

CalRobert 3y ago

Even worse, not only are you not paid to do it, you are paid NOT to do it. I have a few acres of land in Ireland (not a lot, admittedly!) and rewilding it means it is no longer eligible for agricultural subsidies. The government effectively pays you to destroy biodiversity with beef.