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
France’s Le Pen insists party acted in ‘good faith’ at EU fraud appeal
- Le Pen said on her second day of questioning that even if her party broke the law, it was unintentional
- She also argued that the passage of time made it “extremely difficult” for her to prove her innocence
PARIS: French far-right leader Marine Le Pen told an appeals trial on Wednesday that her party acted in “good faith,” denying an effort to embezzle European Parliament funds as she fights to keep her 2027 presidential bid alive.
A French court last year barred Le Pen, a three-time presidential candidate from the far-right National Rally (RN), from running for office for five years over a fake jobs scam at the European institution.
It found her, along with 24 former European Parliament lawmakers, assistants and accountants as well as the party itself, guilty of operating a “system” from 2004 to 2016 using European Parliament funds to employ party staff in France.
Le Pen — who on Tuesday rejected the idea of an organized scheme — said on her second day of questioning that even if her party broke the law, it was unintentional.
“We were acting in complete good faith,” she said in the dock on Wednesday.
“We can undoubtedly be criticized,” the 57-year-old said, shifting instead the blame to the legislature’s alleged lack of information and oversight.
“The European Parliament’s administration was much more lenient than it is today,” she said.
Le Pen also argued that the passage of time made it “extremely difficult” for her to prove her innocence.
“I don’t know how to prove to you what I can’t prove to you, what I have to prove to you,” she told the court.
Eleven others and the party are also appealing in a trial to last until mid-February, with a decision expected this summer.
- Rules were ‘clear’ -
Le Pen was also handed a four-year prison sentence, with two years suspended, and fined 100,000 euros ($116,000) in the initial trial.
She now again risks the maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a one-million-euro ($1.16 million) fine if the appeal fails.
Le Pen is hoping to be acquitted — or at least for a shorter election ban and no time under house arrest.
On Tuesday, Le Pen pushed back against the argument that there was an organized operation to funnel EU funds to the far-right party.
“The term ‘system’ bothers me because it gives the impression of manipulation,” she said.
EU Parliament official Didier Klethi last week said the legislature’s rules were “clear.”
EU lawmakers could employ assistants, who were allowed to engage in political activism, but this was forbidden “during working hours,” he said.
If the court upholds the first ruling, Le Pen will be prevented from running in the 2027 election, widely seen as her best chance to win the country’s top job.
She made it to the second round in the 2017 and 2022 presidential polls, before losing to Emmanuel Macron. But he cannot run this time after two consecutive terms in office.
