Tree planting vs Tree losses
There are many organisations that are promoting tree plantation projects such as One Tree Planted and Grow My Tree. One Tree Planted last year (2021) planted over 25 million trees and this year has a goal of reaching 40 million trees planted. Whilst all this good work is going on we are also in a race not only with the GHG but also nature and man to plant before destruction. What factors are we up against?
Lets review this breakdown into the northern and southern hemisphere.
Tree cover losses in northern regions of the world were the highest on record in 2021, according to new analysis from Global Forest Watch. The Boreal Forest in Russia, Canada and Alaska were up 30% on 2020 for tree losses. This was due to outbreaks of Wildfires. Climate change is seen as a key driver of tree loss in these areas, with hotter drier conditions leading to more wildfires and greater damage from insects. In 2021 Russia saw its worst fire season since records began (2001) with them losing more than 6.5 million hectares of forest.
In Brazil around ten football pitches per minute of tropical primary forest were lost across the year. One factor at play here is that the Brazilian government is actively encouraging the deforestation of the rain forest as they are expanding their agricultural requirements for domestic use as well as to sell abroad. The amount of tree devastation is hard to comprehend but this equates to 40% of all the forests cut down in tropical areas occurred in Brazil. When you add Brazil to the total amount of tropical deforestation, the carbon that these trees could absorb is equal to the annual fossil fuel emissions of India.
Summary
We need to keep planting trees to help the climate fight. Also this should help with the forest fires and natural deforestation however how can we change government policy? That will be the key differentiator in the battle on CO2