Related: A Toyota engineer grows forests: https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-real...
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Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas
51–60 of 113 posts
Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas
#52You can plant trees at $USD0.10 per tree at trees.org
That's really interesting.
According to this [1], a 10 years old `Calliandra calothyrsus` such as the ones they (trees.org) plant captures about 170 kg / 380 lbs of CO2.
According to the World Bank [2], the average European citizen produces 6 tons of CO2 while the average American produces about 16 tons.
That would mean that they can offset the yearly CO2 emissions of an European or American person by planting 35 ($3.5) or 95 ($9.5) trees, respectively. Quite impressive if true.
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[1] http://www.unm.edu/~jbrink/365/Documents/Calculating_tree_ca...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas
#53It can actually be better than this still. Cattle can be part of a solution to helping restore arid land where the soil has been destroyed by intensive farming and erosion. Healthy soil stores enormous amounts of biomass (aka carbon). Intensive farming has destroyed enormous amounts of land world-wide and turned it into desert, releasing lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. This is a reversible process and catlle is part…
Is this actually validated? Living in an area heavily deforested for cattle grazing, the cattle grazed land does not look like a healthy land. The cattle keep all plant life cut right back. Hot sun can easily access the soil drying it out, then when heavy rains come, the top soil all runs off the land. Land that is left without cattle fares better, land that is actively reforested and trees helped to get established…
I'm on my phone in the country side with slow internet so I cant look up a link, but if I remember correctly, you should search "Alan Savory TED Talk" on youtube for an introduction to the use of livestock to reclaim land. Essentially, the issue with most livestock grazing is that it does not mimic natural grazing, which is a seasonal, high volume, high density event where the herd moves on and allows the grazed area time to recover.
Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people are overestimating the value in planting trees. Trees readily plant themselves in areas they are well adapted to. Areas that don’t quickly turn into forests are generally poorly suited to growing trees. Further, not all trees are equivalent with marginal areas generally resulting in small and often very slowly growing trees.
> Trees readily plant themselves in areas they are well adapted to. I am very skeptical if that's true – see formerly forested areas like Iceland, Brazil, etc. It's not easy for a single sapling to grow into a tree, even if the conditions are right. That's why companies like Afforestt exist [0]. [0] http://www.afforestt.com/
Trees don't disperse their seeds an unlimited distance. But, if you look at a map of where they want to plant new trees you will find many trees already in those areas.
Edit, back to your point. Forest fires and other natural events regularly kill off large chunks of trees. They need to be able to grow in those areas in order to survive.
Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas
#55I wonder if anyone is researching genetically modified trees that specialize in carbon sequestration. Sort of like Golden Rice but for climate change.
I wonder that too. Also, how much concrete construction could be replaced with engineered wood construction so that less concrete was manufactured (thus reducing a primary source of CO2 output) and more CO2 could be sequestered in buildings? i.e. can we genetically engineer a tree that grows fast and is well suited for construction uses?
There may be no need to genetically engineer trees for construction at this point, at least not in north america. Some kind of beetle (or was it a fungus?) has killed off a mind boggling number of trees which can be used as engineered wood in construction. As CLT and maybe Brettstapel.
Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas
#56Related: A Toyota engineer grows forests: https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-real...
The cool thing is that you can order your own dense, self-sustaining forest from https://www.afforestt.com — and it doesn't have to be big (100 square meters), and it doesn't take a hundred years, either.
Afforestt was started by the Toyota engineer in OPs citation.
Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas
#57“We still have a net loss of about 10bn trees a year,” Crowther said. This is a horrible number... I wonder what the true loss is, without the component of planted trees?
"The Planet Now Has More Trees Than It Did 35 Years Ago" (Nature publication):
https://psmag.com/environment/the-planet-now-has-more-trees-...
Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas
#58From the article: “Crowther emphasised that it remains vital to reverse the current trends of rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and forest destruction, and bring them down to zero. He said this is needed to stop the climate crisis becoming even worse and because the forest restoration envisaged would take 50-100 years to have its full effect of removing 200bn tonnes of carbon” 200bn tonnes? App…
My interpretation:
Only 42 % of the emitted CO2 stays in the atmosphere[1], the rest is soaked up by land and ocean. The article only relates to the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas
#59A glimmer of hope? Waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of "it will cost too much", "politically it's not possible", or some such...
Re: Many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas
#60Interesting – we need more of such studies. Check out Drawdown [0] for other interventions with quantified costs/benefits. Economists widely agree that carbon pricing is the most effective way to fix climate change [1], and fee-and-dividend implementations are the most viable politically (there's a bill before Congress now [2]). [0] https://www.drawdown.org/ [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/business/economic-sc…
I believe carbon pricing has two aspects - one is to charge carbon emitters, the other aspect is to use that money to do something that reduces existing CO2 levels. Just charging emitters does not completely solve the problem, so research into the best ways to spend the funds generated by carbon pricing is critical.
Charging emitters absolutely solves the problem by itself!
You just have to charge enough to get emissions down to the desired level.