A global reforestation project is how we fix climate change
medium.com
medium.com
https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-1-review-of-basics...
https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-2-co2-removal/
https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-3-other-interventi...
Is this possible, except for marginal areas bordering the deserts? Aren't most desert areas desert because of very low precipitation?
This may be practical for areas such as the example in the article of the Kubuki Desert reforestation project, where desertification due to the encroachment of dunes can be thwarted. But the major deserts such as the Sahara, Gobi, or Arabian Empty Quarter have very low precipitation, below what is needed for grass, desert shrubs, cacti, etc.
i.e. the presence of precipitation and trees are linked. If you remove one you remove the other, and if you add one (trees in this case) you get the other.
Pretty amazing if true.
>Precipitation in the Sahara ranges from zero to about 3 inches of rain per year, with some locations not seeing rain for several years at a time. Occasionally, snow falls at higher elevations. Daytime summer temperatures are often over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) and can drop to near-freezing temperatures at nighttime.
https://www.livescience.com/23140-sahara-desert.html
Precipitation is controlled by the humidity in the prevailing wind systems. Prevailing winds from the northeast drop whatever moisture they have on the southern margins of the Mediterranean or on Egypt and Sudan.
And there is an assumption that there is enough freshwater to do this.
"A third of the world’s biggest groundwater systems are already in distress"
"Water scarcity already affects every continent. Water use has been growing globally at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century, and an increasing number of regions are reaching the limit at which water services can be sustainably delivered, especially in arid regions"
The main "innovation" in this solution isn't "we must plant massive forests," it's that clean (solar-powered) desalination is now possible at very large scales, so we are able to provide the volumes of freshwater necessary for large-scale reforestation and conversion of deserts.
Forestry people have known for decades that trees were the best solution to CO2 in the atmosphere, but there wasn't enough forestable land. And while we can reclaim deserts, we couldn't do it at scale unless we irrigate. And we couldn't do it unless we could affordably create a new source of freshwater that wasn't already needed for humans and agriculture.
Now we have it. Now the solution in possible.
Not sure if any of these proposals plan to attempt to actively reduce soil (or aquifer) salt content, but for basins without sufficient excess water for an outflow, salt build up is a big problem. Managing the salinity requires more fresh water than what is needed to sustain the plane life.
Help foster sustainable ag economy!
> "An acre of empress trees can absorb 103 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. Once the trees reach maturity, farmers harvest their wood for use in houses or musical instruments.[12]"
You can find photos of trees regrowing light fast after being chopped, and from an old root but this is not how you measure accurately growth in a tree. The tree enters in emergency mode and is using all the reserves in the root to restore the lost canopy ASAP. It will slow down considerably in the following years.
A country where Eucalypts are completely dominant is Australia. In the US California is full of them. Both Australia and California have uncontrollable fire problems.
There are plantations of eucalyptus trees in Brazil, either they don't know what introducing them will do to their country or they just don't care.
Before using eucalypts, consider what introducing a very invasive tree that transforms the countryside into something much more flammable than it originally was will do.
> either they don't know what introducing or ...
Is a monoculture. They don't care. Is hard to claim ignorance still in the age of Google.
Non-biodegrading bioplastic made with renewable eneegy could technically work for that role but more plastic waste isn't approved of for obvious reasons.
Beer.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-15/growing-algae-to-brew...
(Wife is a forester)
I realise that has icky connotations, and is anathema to some people, but we will need at least 50% more food over the coming decades, and we are already over-using the land (and especially the sea) by a lot.
Organics, permacultures, symbiotic planting, etc, are all good things, but not nearly enough to meet our future needs.
So we need to concentrate large parts of agriculture into a much smaller footprint.
Hydroponics, aquaponics, indoor fish farms (we really need to stop fishing wild fish at sea, except in the most artisanal line-caught manner), synthetic milk, juices, flours, even grains if possiible, protein from insects, engineered yeasts, etc, etc.
Ideally, we could actually make food much more nutritious, and delicious, by manufacturing most of it.
Good people can help keep it on that ideal course, not a more dystopian one of sickly 'protein pills'.
1) Tons of food is wasted every year http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/world_food_consumptio... (40% of food in the US is wasted) https://www.nrdc.org/issues/food-waste
2) Population is expected to peak at 8.5B https://www.cnbc.com/id/101018722 (only a 10% increase above current levels)
3) Obesity is a major issue in many developed and developing countries, so we can clearly cut down on the amount of food people are eating.
I also don’t believe we know how to help nature. It’s too complex. I think most “ventures” just do more harm, possibly including reforestation (are we SURE big, dark forests are good?) I put more trust into “rewinding” projects that involve just leaving things alone, no matter how much it distresses humans to see dead/dying animals and weeds.
We could save a million+ acres of rainforest, grow to be a non profit of actual value and personally say goodbye to that "useless man" feeling and the waves of melancholy that go with it. Get in touch: infoatfenddotearth
It's looking increasingly likely that lab-grown food will make a lot of that farming obsolete: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-gr...
Solar Foods estimates their process is 20,000 times more land-efficient than farming. Lab-grown beef also looks at least ten times more efficient on land, energy, and water, according to the book Clean Meat.
So if it doesn't take too long before this stuff takes over the market, we could grow our three billion acres of trees on existing arable land and skip most of the desalination.
It might seem impossible for agriculture do disappear all that quickly, but whale oil was the fifth-largest industry in the U.S., then kerosene came along and wiped it out in a couple decades. And according to studies, people overwhelmingly eat what's cheap and tastes good; if lab-grown foods can manage to taste good and leverage their low resource use into low prices, things could change very quickly.
And here's an idea: process the wood into a form that can be used for land reclamation without decomposing, cover said land with topsoil, grow trees on said land. Voila: a buffer against worsening coastal erosion due to sea level rise, that also locks in carbon in terms of the trees used to build the footing, and moreover provides extra land for growing trees and locking in even more carbon.
Its quite sad because much of the land is so wet and compacted now, yet when Ireland had higher tree coverage, as much as 80% of the extensive precipitation that the Atlantic throws at us never even penetrated the soil. Much of the elements that make life harsh today were at one time regulated by forest ecologies to people's benifit.
A possible solution would be a long term compensation of farmers in exchange for their grazing rights on the 1,050,000 acres of commonage. With the sheep off the uplands,20 years could be sufficient for natural woodland revival. Given that sheep farming is essentially a subsidised activity the financials could be feasible... But you try saying that in a pub in the west of Ireland and making it out the door with both your arms still attached to your torso.
If you drive through the highway that goes through the forest today, it is unimaginable it was a restoration project. There is even a cool observation desk somewhere in the middle
> The forest was replanted from 1949 to 1973 in the largest reforestation project of its kind.
It may have helped fix climate if we had stopped deforestation in 1992 after the first UN climate summit, used only sustainable wood from that moment on and cleared no mature forest for pasture or palm oil. Oh, and started migrating to zero carbon economies when it would have taken a percent or two reduction a year, rather than the throw ourselves off a reduction cliff required now. Thanks politicians!
Right now we're still clear cutting, legally and illegally, mature scruffy ancient forest that provides carbon store, and massive bio diversity. At the same time tree planting campaigns and forestry mainly create limited diversity, or no-diversity monocrop desert (forestry). Typically neat proof of human interference. How many tens of years growing or thousands of hectares planted to equate the mature wood and stored carbon lost around the world every day? How much biodiversity and how many species compared to mature, "nature hewn" forest? Global reforestation projects will destroy more ecosystems... What will be the unintended consequences of foresting deserts and the necessary human activity, irrigation, even desalination? How many more species will go as a consequence?
Now had we created no-development zones around forests, to allow them to expand naturally, in a world not deforesting at ever increasing rate...
Strange that you would indict the State for failing to legislate Industry, as though the latter had no agency and were therefore uniquely blameless.
I indict the states, particularly the developed states, for not bringing forth regulation requiring environmental consideration, emissions reduction, sustainability with penalties encompassing delisting, huge fines and exec imprisonment. Companies are quite happy to drive everyone off a cliff for a little more gold. We've known that since the first days of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
Yet the denizens of this forum enthusiastically turn the crank while bemoaning the State's inability to stop us.
I am no fan of rainforest destruction and the ensuing loss of biodiversity, but globally the world is not deforesting:
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offse...
Replacing the carbon storage of a single 100 metre mature rain forest meranti, and the diverse ecosystem below it by new growth requires how many square miles? It's a net loss for a century, perhaps more. Overall it's a colossal loss.
I note that article accounts for area covered only. No mention of the human activity, of the clear burning, size of trees, amount of other growth under the canopy etc.
I think you are overly concerned but here you raise a good point: foresting a desert could lower the albedo of the Earth. If not offset by the CO2 uptake of the trees, this could have a net greenhouse effect on the climate.
Such questions are not tolerated, so be warned.
These are fair questions. Where are they not tolerated? And by whom?
Now they can re-plant locally appropriate species and create new forest that will eventually appear to be entirely natural ancient woodland or rain forest. Forest that's destined to be mainly left alone as carbon sequestration. Along with wood production that's sympathetic to the planet and sustainable.
Greening deserts feels, to me, like a "near neutrality" re-wilding project. Something we can think of adding in a push to carbon negative, to undo some of the damage done. Something to do after we have sustainable, renewable electricity everywhere network to desalinate and irrigate. Something that can be carefully seeded to take account of species and that appears and acts natural, and stays put as national park or reservation. Without destroying yet another wilderness.
Not as a green project slapped down as Deus ex machina solution in a world that's not yet moving to neutrality. That risks making it worse. In fact it will almost certainly make it worse as coal and oil is still permitted to keep on looking for new markets and uses.
Some of us are also looking beyond the challenges (e.g., coal power) that have known solutions for the most impactful thing we can do to buy more time. Large transportation, electricity, and agricultural infrastructure will take time and lots of political will to change.
Planting trees on unproductive land with desalinated ocean water that no one's fighting over is low-hanging fruit.
I'm not sure trying to convert desert into forest is even a good idea. Some of these deserts have been around a long, long time and harbor their own unique organisms. And as the article mentions it could cause unpredictable disruptions in weather patterns.
It seems pretty clear that right now there isn't any one silver bullet strategy that is going to avert climate disaster. We absolutely have to reduce emissions and increase carbon sequestration to get to net-zero, then we need to go further into net-sequestration of carbon.
The most cost effective path to fixing more carbon is to plant right, and without cutting.
That's an equivalent of less than 200km in a compact car or 2kg of beef.
I believe it makes more sense to pick the low hanging fruit which is making transportation more efficient and reducing the impact of food production.
Negative rant over, it's still not a bad idea for the fact that it'd slow down the worst effects of climate change for a while, buying time for other solutions like renewable energy and whatnot, but it's not a pancea.
Or do they sequester less than they emit?
Since there's a limited tree mass per area unit that the ground can support, once you reach that mass the input and output need to zero out, since there's nowhere to store any additional CO2.
Young rapidly growing forests sequester carbon more quickly than mature forests, but mature forests still sequester some carbon, possibly into the soil. (One source https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080910133934.h... ) Separately, the regrown forest could be maintained in a state of peak carbon sequestration by doing selective logging from time to time, and as a bonus it would be profitable to do so.
I recommend this article that clears some ideas about trees and co2: https://medium.com/the-philipendium/trees-and-carbon-dioxide...
I have to agree with the posted article, even if it is mixing acres and square meters in the explanations.
I am not deluding myself that we will mitigate climate change by covering Earth in sequoia, but still that gives some timescale on how long trees can live.
If we could mitigate climate change for another 1,500 years we would probably have found some other mitigations by then.
The oldest known tree in the world is 5000 years old.
No individual trees are known to live hundreds of thousands of years.
There are clonal trees, like aspens, that could live as a colony for hundreds of thousands of years, but that's not quite the same thing (and our oldest verified example is only 80k years old).
It also improves the soil long term - particularly in sandy soils it helps water retention.
Obviously this is much more work that just planting and forgetting though.
If we used cross-laminated timber [1] to construct our buildings instead of concrete, there would be an economical incentive to keep a lot of timber forests around. For additional carbon-negativity (and soil quality!) the timber industry could be required to biochar and bury its litter. This way, without too much government coercion, maybe our building frenzy [2] could end up being carbon negative?
Much like modern diesel engines that make (polluted) air clean(er) [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-laminated_timber
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXNJa86tErQ
[3] https://newmobility.news/2019/08/28/can-new-diesel-engines-a...
Old growth forests often grow on rocky land, and have little long-term depth accumulation.
Source: hiking old growth forests over decades, and being a farmer.
I've rarely hiked in harvested and replanted forests; these are boring. I did most of my hiking in central/northern BC and Alberta, Canada. These are some of the largest tracts of old-growth timber in the world.
The many old-growth forests I've hiked (sample: >1,000km, mostly dominated by conifers), with last burn times ranging from decades to centuries, have rarely boasted deep soil levels. This hypothesis is supported by existing research: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225314103_Soil_Carb...
Old-growth coniferous forests are great -- but they're not a big "carbon store".
If you want land-use based carbon storage, I'd recommend investigating where the continent-wide, massive, deep, healthy carbon-rich store of topsoil and humous came from -- grazed grasslands and scrub brush.
The article you link mentions softwood forests being problematic for carbon accumulation. Not hardwood forests. Old growth temperate hardwood forests are quite rare now, and some of the apex tree species in those forests have very serious pathogens keeping them from re-establishing, more's the pity.
Once a soil matures (a process that might take many decades), the amount of CO2 retained vs emitted reaches equilibrium.
Also, maybe it is my mind's desire to simplify of all of it, but it was eye opening for me, and seemed obvious upon seeing that video, that forests were the key player in air management globally, and industrialized nations were the main drivers behind CO2 production in the air globally.
Specifically, what if we start burying dead trees or those who reached peak mass in places where conditions will transform them into coal in 100(00..) of years?
That way carbon is captured and stored until we burn them again.
We do in fact need people to just start planting trees.
So, natural death and decomp is not the only things to worry about with using forests.
Also it may help sustaining the good chain.
If we look at climate research we also see a similar concern. Reforestation only work as a carbon sink if it also accompanies agreements to not harvest the tress and keep the forest as reservations. In simple terms, global reforestation in order to combat climate change has the same challenge as a global initiatives to create more forest reservations.
A global reforestation policy without extending the reservations is carbon neutral. It is much better than deforestation, but it won't fix the problem of fossil fuels putting out massive amount of carbon into the air.
With current tech, we could drastically reduce emissions by moving to a mix of nuclear (the modern, safe kind) for baseload plus wind and solar for peak, but it's going to take few decades to build it all out, and during the intervening period we have a lot of excess CO2 we need to sequester.
Having done that would cut down the CO2 emissions drastically, and then the reforestation becomes a more realistic target and would indeed a very practical means to get to net zero emissions. And even if it were only a small part, setting up desalination to green large parts of the desert would be a big net win. But before we use solar cells to produce water for growing trees, we should use the electricity produced to not burn fossil fuels in the first place.
The only thing that's needed is to incentivize such research. Let's say creating a global fund of 20-30 Billion dollars and encouraging researchers to apply for grants from this fund.
Next step after basic research is done and something feasible invented would be to commercialize the solutions. However again here we would need incentives. It is really hard to implement the idea without commercial interest.
What would be a good incentive for this? Well, the captured carbon could be sold... Any other ideas?
Hmmmmm
The key here is that we're out of time. This coming decade is probably the last one we will have where the problem can be solved at a cost less than 10% of world GDP. If we wait another 10 years, I suspect all solutions will require a significant fraction of global GDP and authoritarian-style interventions.
As a technologist, I'd love a magical new technology. But I'm also an engineer, and I want to execute the most efficient and low-risk solution in the smallest possible timeframe. After taking all factors into account, that's massive reforestation.
If new technologies are developed in the meantime, that's GOOD. Every bit of help that's put into play helps us. It's not a competition, it's a collective race against time, and we can all contribute.
I've often thought that vast swathes of otherwise barren land on this planet could be used for cultivating hemp and Cannabis, for a vast amount of uses (not just getting high).
It obviously grows very quickly compared to trees. And like 'a weed'. The 're-greenification' of land would be rapid.
I like the scalability aspects of this. I don't think we have a technical solution that is as scalable as a biological one. I do think that simply "planting trees" is not going to do the trick though.
It isn't. Besides being inadequate even on its own terms, creating large and flammable forests in a time of increasing droughts is just going to lead to megafires, which will instantly eliminate all gains from years of forestation.
We should still plant trees. There's no real downside to doing so except the cost. But you absolutely cannot count on flammable forests locking up carbon forever. Forests burn, they get cut down for firewood, bad things happen to them.
Tree-planting is, like, 1% of what needs to be done, not 90%. It's a 1% solution.
$3T each year (4% of world GDP) for 20 years still sounds like a lot.
I think the actual costs will be a lot lower as this will take many years of experimentation before scaling, and by then the cost of the solar panels (which I think is the vast majority of the cost) will likely have continued to ride its exponential downward cost curve. One source: https://earthtechling.com/solar-energy-costs-trends/
This is also being done in locations that were forests a few hundred years ago before humans cut them down. The mature forest is a self-sustaining ecosystem, but it needs extra water for a few decades until it reaches that point. https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2020/01/12/hawaii-news/yisha...
Nobody asks people in the developing world what they think about it. I suspect many of them would feel the same way about being forced to change their land use the same way the yellowjackets feel about an increase in the price of fuel.
Uh huh. Good to know this guy has it all figured out.
Edit: trying to find the most absurd claim in this. I think it has to be the desalinization idea. That we can “just” scale up desalinization at existing marginal costs to 3 TRILLION cubic meters of water. The entire world currently desalinizes less than a billion each year. So that’s at least a 300x increase in water production! And how do we provide the energy to do this? The article hand waves it off as “solar power”. Yeah sure that would be great. Forget the cost of infrastructure or the transportation or the space for the solar power or whatever
Trees are great. By all means, plant trees. But don’t go thinking this poorly reasoned back of the envelope math is going to help.
There is. Just stop emitting greenhouse gases.
Greenhouse gases could still be used for numerous applications, as long as we stop using it for power generation, ground transportation, and manufacturing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064741.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals [...] A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
One is the ordinary corporate manager which is not especially ideological. This person might be part of the problem because CO2 emissions help the firm make money, but they'd have no deep problem with making money without CO2 emissions.
Another is Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and other funders of the "new right" who actively campaign to make governments less responsive to issues such as climate change -- predominantly by spamming the agenda so that politicians never get far past "lowering taxes for the rich".
A third is the ordinary people, which makes the problem particularly difficult. In most countries the #1 way to have a riot is to raise the price of fuel. For instance, after Macron destroyed his credibility by cutting the wealth tax, he was unable to ask the "yellowjackets" to make any sacrifices. Now he can't manage pension "reform" for the same reason.
I beg your pardon?
Who exactly is holding a gun to humanity's head?
Are you thinking of entire populations or do you have specific individuals in mind?
And what does your plan look like?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to ask you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19252288
But it’s your site. I hope you and your colleagues reconsider this stance, however, at least in regards to this specific issue, especially given its unprecedented importance.
This is useful because polling has discovered many US Republicans will actually vote for climate solutions _if_ they employ new technologies that would result in new industries.
And since nothing comes close to the cost to energy density ratio of fossil fuels, there is no solution other than reducing energy usage and reducing quality of life. And so without convincing people they should reduce their quality of life for the benefit of future generations, nothing is going to happen.
So you're effectively denying the possibility? I'd say that's a pretty gargantuan assumption to make.
We have the solution in hand, but no will to embrace it.
Which unless we come up with some pretty smart measures is inevitably going to involve poorer lifestyles for most in the developed world, in effect (and perhaps this explains the keeness on the left for environmental issues) moving us to a more socialist model, wherein hard work offers far less in terms of monetary reward than at present.
Personally, I'm forced to compete because I live in a stupidly overpriced part of the world in terms of housing (SE UK) but apart from a nice house I need very little to support my ego apart from my dog and family, so I think I'd cope with the poorer lifestyle far better than many people I see around me, seeming to have built their self-worth around posessions and silly crazes.
Imagine you’re a janitor. Every day the boss drives away in a Maserati and every day you wait for the bus. You’ve been working really hard hoping for a 2 dollars an hour raise, but one day the boss brings you into his office and tells you the money is not there. The following day, you find out that executive bonuses have increased by 20 percent and the company has issued 50 billion dollars in stock buybacks. How does this make you feel about the value of hard work?
Look: if you’re the ceo of a corporation you can basically set your own paycheck. To suggest that these guys are diligently going over data, studying the best pay structure to attract talent, and so forth is totally naive. For one thing, none of these guys are very good at math. At the end of the day, trying to set your pay structure to grow the company is really hard. Cutting everyone’s pay to give yourself a raise is really easy. These are people whose parents paid for them to get into Harvard, they played golf with the right people to get into upper management they’ve always thought of themselves as above and separate from the common people who they hold in utter contempt- you’re not going to see very ethical behavior from someone like that. No tears will be shed for them if we have to bring a little balance back to society in order to save it.