KUALA LUMPUR: The best way to keep climate change in check is by replanting trees on destroyed forest areas the size of the United States, scientists said on Thursday, as doing so would capture two-thirds of man-made planet-warming emissions.
Tom Crowther, a professor at the Crowther Lab, a research group based at ETH Zurich, urged hundreds of thousands of people who skipped school and work this year in a growing movement for climate action to start planting trees or funding such efforts.
“Every other climate change solution requires that we all change our behavior, or we need some top-down decision from a politician who may or may not believe in climate change, or it’s a scientific discovery we don’t yet have,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“This one is not only our most powerful solution — it’s one that every single one of us can get involved with,” he said.
While planting trees to suck up a quarter of carbon in the atmosphere, including human and natural sources, is an ambitious goal, Crowther said it could be achieved if all members of the public concerned about global warming got behind the drive.
Crowther Lab scientists on Thursday published what they said was the first study looking at how many trees the world can support, where they could be grown, and how much carbon they could store.
The best places to reforest are in the tropics because of the fast rate trees grow there, but replanting land can be done in most countries and even at home, Crowther added.
The Crowther Lab website has a global map with advice on which types of trees and how many can be grown in gardens.
The tropics lost 12 million hectares (29 million acres) of tree cover in 2018 — much due to fires, land-clearing for farming and mining — the fourth-highest annual loss since records began in 2001, according to monitoring service Global Forest Watch.
Environmentalists say looking after existing forests and restoring damaged ones prevents flooding, stores carbon, limits climate change and protects biodiversity.
Worldwide, there are about 5.5 billion hectares of forest.
The study, published in the journal Science, analyzed the maximum amount of carbon that could be captured if all available degraded forest areas were replanted and allowed to mature.
Forests could be regrown on 1.7 billion-1.8 billion hectares of denuded areas that are no longer in use, adding 1.4 billion hectares if cropland and urban areas were included, it said.
More than half the potential to restore trees is found in Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil and China.
Many countries have already made reforestation commitments under the Bonn Challenge, agreed by nations in Germany in 2011.
That effort calls for 350 million hectares of degraded land worldwide to be restored by 2030.
Crowther said about 40% of countries worldwide had proposed to restore an area “vastly under” what was possible, while 10% were aiming to add more trees than they could support.
The new data would help them refine their targets, he said.
Scientists urge climate protesters to save planet by planting trees
Scientists urge climate protesters to save planet by planting trees
- Zurich-based scientists published what they said was the first study looking at how many trees the world can support
Nigerian president vows security reset in budget speech
- Government plans to buy 'cutting-edge' equipment to boost the fighting capability of military
ABUJA: Nigeria’s president vowed a national security overhaul as he presented the government budget, allocating the largest share of spending to defense after criticism over the handling of the country’s myriad conflicts.
Nigeria faces a long-running insurgency in the northeast, while armed “bandit” gangs commit mass kidnappings and loot villages in the northwest, and farmers and herders clash in the center over dwindling land and resources.
President Bola Tinubu last month declared a nationwide security emergency and ordered mass recruitment of police and military personnel to combat mass abductions, which have included the kidnapping of hundreds of children at their boarding school.
He told the Senate that his government plans to increase security spending to boost the “fighting capability” of the military and other security agencies by hiring more personnel and buying “cutting-edge” equipment.
Tinubu promised to “usher in a new era of criminal justice” that would treat all violence by armed groups or individuals as terrorism, as he allocated 5.41 trillion naira ($3.7 billion) for defense and security.
Security officials and analysts say there is an increasing alliance between bandits and extremists from Nigeria’s northeast, who have in recent years established a strong presence in the northwestern and central regions.
“Under this new architecture, any armed group or gun-wielding non-state actors operating outside state authority will be regarded as terrorists,” said Tinubu, singling out, among others, bandits, militias, armed gangs, armed robbers, violent cult groups, and foreign-linked mercenaries.
He said those involved in political or sectarian violence would also be classified as terrorists.
On the economic front, Tinubu hailed his “necessary” but not “painless” reforms that have plunged Nigeria into its worst economic crisis in a generation.
He said inflation has “moderated” for eight successive months, declining to 14.45 percent in the last month from 24.23 percent in March this year.
He projected that the budget deficit will drop next year to 4.28 percent of GDP from around 6.1 percent of GDP in 2023, the year he came into office.
