Pakistani province plants one billion trees to slow down global warming effects | Hacker News Reader

Pakistani province plants one billion trees to slow down global warming effects

independent.co.uk

133 pointsvitro68 comments

Meanwhile Pakistan will open five new coal plants next year [1] and more in the future as part of Chinese energy investments, in which coal is an central element. This is because the coal industry (and steel industry, which is dependent on coal) supplies roughly 12 million Chinese jobs [2]. So while green initiatives with foreign financing are endorsed and promoted by Cricket-star Imran Khan, it isn't Pakistan's nor China's official policy.

[1]: https://qz.com/949465/in-china-and-pakistans-coal-romance-wh...

[2]: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2017-08-04/chi...

Coal Power plants with trees are better than just coal power plants.

Pakistan can build nuclear reactors instead. They have the technology.

I suspect that will be a very unpopular opinion around here.

HN loves nuclear power.

Or is this a comment about subcontinental international politics?

everyobe is very excited about nuclear energy as long as the plant is on the other side of the continent.

I don't see why. Nuclear reactors are objectively far less damaging than coal plants, even if you ignore global warming, and include Chernobyl (no containment dome) and Fukushima (70's-era plant plus tsunami). As far as proliferation goes, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons.

Popularity is not about facts.

When someone says "nuclear" many unthinking people with votes think "That's bad they could blow me up or polute all the things" and then shut off their brain to rational responses.

Because they have votes the politicians "Here" take action. If "Here" is Pakistan that means fewer plants in this case. If "Here" is the USA it means strained relations with Pakistan and perhaps even some public condemnation and minor sanctions.

They are in process. According to Wikipedia[0] "Pakistan plans on constructing 32 nuclear power plants by 2050"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Pakistan

Yeah, but they build nukes instead.

Not really, not necessarily.

Pakistan can build the bomb, and the reactors for high grade Pu. That doesn't mean they can make a thermal reactor which has many different and difficult challenges. The metallurgy to make a high pressure reactor vessel for 500 MW is quite different from making a quickly refueled open pool reactor.

In fact, most western countries' reactor designs are derived from US licenses.

They've had nuclear powered electricity since 1972 and have 1.3 GW plants operating commercially.

Two additional plants at 1.1 GW each slated to add to the grid by 2021/2.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...

Or they could have all three: coal-fired power plants, trees, and nuclear reactors.

Granted, in the long run coal is neither a healthy, environmentally friendly or sustainable option but in the short term it may be one of the few viable options.

Even if they didn't have the technology, what stops them from hiring a company from another country that has such technology?

Pakistan can't hire anyone to build reactors or buy most of parts needed because they are not willing to sign NPT, unless they become part of NSG. So, they are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. They know fresh water resources are not unlimited for sub-continent and coal is worst possible solution for electric short fall. So, they are also working on Solar [1] and wind [2], along with some development on nuclear which is indeed very slow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaid-e-Azam_Solar_Park

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jhimpir_Wind_Power_Plant

Edit:correction.

Haters are going to hate. naysayers are gonna naysay. Such negative sentiment. How is planting one billion trees not a good thing? In terms of energy consumption per capita, China is less than one third of the US while Pakistan is less than one tenth of the US [1]. In terms of CO2 emission per capita, China is less than half of the US [2]. You would be happy if China and Pakistan all go dark.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

> How is planting one billion trees not a good thing?

Yes, exactly.

China is going to build 700 coal plants around the world:

http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/chinese-firms-to-...

Sure, it’s great to celebrate our wins, like planting trees, but unless we examine the big problem those little wins really aren’t going to matter.

I understand that per capita China and India emit less CO2, but China already has double the US output.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

The world simply can’t handle burning all of that coal. Getting China and India to use nuclear or natural gas would help a lot.

Not only China and India emit much less CO2 per capita, the US has emitted far more CO2 than any other country accumulatively. The US has been industrialized for more than one hundred years and had been the No1 emitter of CO2 for more than a century until very recently. All these CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere has not been cleaned up yet. True we should all use cleaner energy sources. Planting one billion tree is a step towards a greener environment.

It depends on the species of trees. Some are very good, other not so. In concept the idea sounds smart and positive for everybody. We need more smart people, so I hope they succeed.

I don't see any negative point of view towards the initiative in your comment's parent, but additional information that helps understand the context of this initiative and challenges you should care about if you think this initiative is a good thing.

It also didn't compare China and Pakistan to the US (negatively nor positively), though I appreciate you adding even more context.

I'm a bit confused by this effort. Isn't the idea that it isn't really next year or the next decade that we are worried about, but instead it is the long term impact of increasing CO2 on the environment that is the real problem.

CO2 added to the atmosphere from underground sources increases the net CO2 (for centuries); trees just move it temporarily from the atmosphere to the tree and then from the tree back to the atmosphere once the tree dies (through the process of decay or burning). Of course, using the timber for construction or paper or whatever keeps the CO2 from returning to the atmosphere longer, but eventually it ends up back in the atmosphere. At steady state the trees are dying and rotting at the same rate the the forest is growing.

Naturally, its a good thing that while the forest is growing it slows the overall rate of increase in CO2; perhaps having some number of decades of a tiny bit of our CO2 absorbed is a useful stopgap on the way to a world where we stop burning hydrocarbons pulled from under the earth. However, this isn't in any way a solution for the long term.

It seems unlikely that the world will utilize less energy in the future so the solution would seem to involve right away (1) moving from coal to natural gas (cuts CO2 generation in half for the same energy output) and as soon as possible (2) moving from all hydrocarbons to nuclear, solar, and wind.

> trees just move it temporarily from the atmosphere to the tree and then from the tree back to the atmosphere once the tree dies (through the process of decay or burning).

Your point stands, but if the trees are used for construction or carpentry, it would move the CO2 release quite a long time away from now.

Cutting down old trees, using them efficiently (not burning them), and planting new ones works well to sequester carbon for a long time.

If you maintain the forest, that is re-plant trees that die - which the forest will normally do itself once it is established, it is isn't temporarily.

It will be a buffer for CO2 that is bound in the forest as long as that forest stands, which could be for many, many millennia. Not everything will be released back to the atmosphere either, the forest will establish soil that will also bind a lot of carbon.

Humans harvest billions of trees a year we need to start replanting them in similar numbers. Btw this was not just about co2 it is also about replacing forests that were destroyed by illegal logging destroying rivers and animal habitats. The rainfall in these areas has come down a lot as well.

Absolutely, whether the logging was legal or not, loss of habitat is a very sad thing. Soon, many iconic animals -- the large mammals of Africa, gorillas, tigers and so forth -- will live only in zoos or special parks, but it isn't just those animals we see everyday on television that will no longer survive in the wild. Entire ecosystems are being lost with everything from the individual species of nematodes that survive on only one species of beetle that survives in only one habitat.

Great news, I view mass reforestation as one of the best endeavors an organization can undertake right now, in terms of providing good for society.

That ought to do it.

Seriously though, anyone care to do the math on the impact of 1bn trees wrt. CO2 absorption? Would be interesting to know how it compares to how much we need to remove to get back to historical levels.

The first estimate google found for carbon fixing is new growth fixes ~0.7 lbs/tree-year and old-growth is ~1.5lbs/tree-year[1].

So 0.7 billion pounds, or ~300k tonnes of C/year

Global carbon emissions are around 10 billion tonnes annually so that's about .003% of annual emissions.

1: http://sustainability.tufts.edu/carbon-sequestration/ (note that the per-tree is CO2 weight, not C weight)

So put another way if every country (~200) planted this many trees it would capture about half a percent of the carbon we release each year.

That really puts into perspective how much carbon is trapped in fossil fuel reserves for me. Put another way a few companies can dig so much carbon out of the ground the that they could outdo 195 countries each planting a billion trees by 200 fold.

Well, coal is in a very real sense concentrated trees, accumulated over massive timescales. So it isn't terribly strange that a handful of decade's worth of trees couldn't offset that.

You are totally correct, but it violates the intuition of many people.

But small trees tend to die, so a better measure is by area planted. Internet is telling me trees fix about 7.7g/m²/d of CO2 (not carbon) and Pakistan has planted about 350k hectares. So that's about 4.6 million tons of CO2 per year once established.

Edit to add:

There is some hope though, as there are some people trying to work out the carbon fixation in the soil, indirectly caused by the trees, which might boost the numbers for healthy forests substantially over tree farms.

4.6M tonnes is within the range of the old-growth/new-growth estimate on a per-tree basis (CO2 is ~3.7x the weight of carbon).

It should be noted that they plan to restore 150 million hectares by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030, which is 428x and 1000x respectively.

Furthermore they have one of the highest survival rates of trees in the world, ranging from 70 to 90 per cent.

Together, these two metrics are very encouraging.

Where did you get those numbers from please?

The article linked above.

350MM hectares is at the point where it really starts to make an impact compared with usage cuts. The US (though add in China and India if you count reductions in projected growth) is probably the only country that has a near-term chance of being able to unilaterally cut worldwide carbon output by 3%, but Pakistan seems to have the ability to increase carbon sequestering by 3% of current worldwide carbon output.

That's... a lot of land. 150 million hectares is a square over 750 miles on a side. 166 Yellowstones' of restored forest.

While globally it is a drop in the ocean, locally the quality of air should improve.

I think the more significant impacts will be in the new wood resource, and in combating soil erosion (which, through dust, is a big air pollution problem all across that side of the continent). If they can scale up demand for lumber immensely, and staff good foresters, they can probably do a lot of good. A mature cut tree is a great way to store carbon "forever".

No idea of the species, but fullgrown they might be 10-50 tons. Maybe 20% of the tree is carbon by weight, so 2-10 tons per tree. So, maybe 2-10bn tons of carbon when they are grown?

The good news is that's a lot. The bad news is the yearly carbon production of just the American car fleet is only an order of magnitude or two lower.

"Seriously though, anyone care to do the math on the impact of 1bn trees wrt. CO2 absorption?"

That should be a fairly simple calculation, as children to your post have shown ...

More interesting (and difficult) is the carbon costs of actually planting the trees in the first place ... 40% of the trees were saplings[1] that were moved and planted with labor that was fed and moved, etc.

I have no idea how those figures pencil out - if the best-case absorption is 1.5 lbs/tree per year, is it obvious that less than 100-150 lbs of carbon is spent in planting the tree ?

[1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/billion-tree-tsun...

Anybody who is interested in the numbers on this should checkout the work being done at drawdown.org. Afforestation is ranked #15 out of a list of solutions to reduce the carbon content of our atmosphere and reduce global warming. They have models and data if you want.

http://www.drawdown.org/solutions/land-use/afforestation

How long does it take a tree to grow into something that substantially effects carbon counts in the atmosphere? 1 year? 10 years?

They take carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, so they are most effective when they are young. When they die they tend to release most of it, but an established old-growth forest in China was estimated to sequester 9 tons of carbon per hectare per year. http://www.co2science.org/articles/V14/N15/EDIT.php

I thought that the defining attribute of an old-growth forest is that it is in relative stasis in terms of the distribution of trees (i.e. in carbon balance)

The article claims that it caused some recalculation in sequestration models. Here is the original paper and some discussion from the peer review. https://www.clim-past.net/7/685/2011/cp-7-685-2011-discussio...

In fact, only growing trees have significant net absorption of CO2. Older trees, specially the non-fruit bearing kind, have negligible net CO2 absorption. Cutting down old trees may not be good for the ecosystem, but it is great for CO2 absorption, as long as something else is planted in its place, preferably a very fast growing tree.

Older trees are still growing, for example you can still count rings to estimate how old a tree is.

'according to a new study published in Nature, it turns out that the oldest trees are actually still growing rapidly, and storing increasing amounts of carbon as they age' http://science.time.com/2014/01/15/study-shows-older-trees-a...

Do these numbers seem implausible to anyone else? A billion trees in two years is 1.3 million trees per day. 57,000 trees per hour, non-stop for 24 hours per day. Seems unlikely.

It's doable, 66 million per 12 hours is 5.5 million per hour, more than 1.5 million of volunteers.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-05/india-breaks-record-pl...

I feel like I should point out that reforestation has a lot of value outside of carbon sequestration. Even if trees don't fix our carbon emissions by themselves, they help. Forests also:

- Increase biodiversity

- Improve air quality

- Reverse desertification

- Provide sustainable wood supply (with good management)

- Reduces erosion, landslides, and floods

They won't solve global warming, but they help- along with all the other positives, to boot.

A billion trees sounds like a lot.

  >>> sqrt(1e9)
  31622.776601683792    # trees on a side
  >>> 31623*4/5280      # assume they're planted on 4' centers
  23.956818181818182    # miles square

So like a medium US national park. A decent contribution.

Meanwhile Russia is resurrecting the Wooly Mammoth to knock down trees in an effort to slow global warming.

http://a16z.com/2017/07/17/pleistocenepark-geoengineering-re...

Any picture of some of these billion trees? We get a picture of Imran Khan but I already know what he looks like :)

Here ya go: https://www.voanews.com/a/one-billion-trees-planted-in-pakis...

This article has both

Thank you random internet benefactor. I didn't notice/follow the link at the end of the story. Is that really four years of growth? Doesn't look like both photos are taken from the same place.

(Also – confession time. I thought Punjab was in India, turns out part of it is in Pakistan. Shows my shocking geographical skillz.)

Cheers! That seems like a much better article.

i remember when former LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa advocated a goal of planting another 1 million trees. never reached it. too much water was required.

with global warning and frequent droughts, the thinking is now that LA is a "post oasis" landscape.

Are there any projects like this going on in the United States?

I think under the current administration we cannot expect the US to be a leader in this area.

Thanks captain.

There's a huge re-forestation effort in the US that's been going on for a few decades now (not directly aimed at "global warming") without any sign of slowing down. My understanding is there hasn't been a net-negative year in terms of the forest coverage in the US in about 25 years despite some massive forest fires etc.

Do you have a source for that?

In a way -- almost all of the Northeastern U.S., from Pennsylvania to central Maine, had been cleared, for agriculture or logging or both, by around 1900. Much of the area is forested again, through no particularly concerted program that I know of. This is why you'll often encounter stone walls in the middle of the woods -- they were put up at the edge of farm plots and pastures. Once it was no longer economical to log the region on a large scale, logging slowed. Improved transportation and the settling of the Great Plains made it comparatively much less profitable to farm the inferior soils of the Northeast. Furthermore, especially in Pennsylvania, resource extraction turned to oil instead of lumber in the early 20th century. The combination of these factors meant that people stopped cutting trees faster than they grew back, except in densely populated areas.

One billion trees in 4 years is like 28,000 trees per hour. Seems a bit far fetched.

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