8 billion trees criticism

A study published this week in the journal PNAS found that the most effective way to protect the Amazon rainforest might be to leave it in the hands of its indigenous residents. Exploring 'culture' in the broadest sense - from art, film and new media, to popular culture and social movements - in relation to contemporary issues such as globalisation, technology and social and cultural conflicts and identities. And a Pakistani government investigation found that at least $3 million in Tree Tsunami funds were stolen, mostly by government officials and landowners involved in the program. Planting trees on snowy terrain that once reflected the sun could even turn those places into dark patches that actually absorb heat. South Africa has recently faced critical water shortages affecting major cities that have been exacerbated by invasive trees, and the government spends millions of dollars annually on a program called Working for Water to remove them from key watersheds and conservation areas. Organizers of the Cauvery tree-planting project have said the criticism against it is a baseless opinion that contains blatant untruths and loose comments with no backing in facts. It says the trees will revive the river by increasing water retention. Retrieved July 16, 2021, from https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/global/?category=summary&dashboard, 10Global Footprint Network. But a growing number of scientists and environmentalists are challenging this narrative on tree-planting. In April of this year, Carbon Plan published a scathing report showing that forestry offsets had been severely over-credited. Criticism has also been leveled at the project for impeding on land used for pasture. For . Terrapass. Trees are an integral part of many animals livelihood, supplying food and shelter most importantly. But critics believe that it is an unsustainable and expensive waste of resources. The findings have been published in leading journals, and Jane Goodall, David Attenborough and others cite Crowthers lab research. At its core, 8 Billion Trees carries out large-scale tree planting and tree conservation operations to fuel positive environmental change and defend habitats for animals, while also caring for displaced and hurt animals by utilizing wildlife sanctuaries and veterinary clinics focused in devastated and deforested areas. Some international bodies have also claimed that the project has created around 85,000 jobs. NASA Supercomputing Study Breaks Ground for Tree Mapping, Carbon In contrast, planting trees in snowy regions near the poles is likely to cause a net warming, while planting them in temperate climates like that of the UK, much of Europe and parts of the US may have no net effect on climate. Science published six critiques of the paper, criticizing its methods and results, and the Crowther Lab was forced to issue corrections. Dont use reforestation as an excuse for cutting down old-growth forests, because its no substitute., Even Thomas Crowther has backpedaled on tree planting. They calculated that planting continuous forest on this area, almost the size of the United States, would increase global forested area by a quarter and could store about a quarter of the current atmospheric carbon pool, an extraordinary amount. Smart and Archibald say that we should be looking less at trees and forests and more under the literal surface for carbon storage solutions, because in many parts of the world, far more carbon is held in the soil than in aboveground biomass. Still, not all tree-planting initiatives are created equal. The government has said that it launched the plan to reverse environmental degradation but critics believe that is not the case. In other words, if we stopped cutting down trees we would cut our annual emissions by about 10%. Restoring forests may be one of our most powerful weapons in fighting climate change. "Many saplings planted in Gujranwala burnt within no time due to intense heat,'' said the senior government official. Forest Atlas. In 2020 alone, the 25.8 Mha (mega hectares) of tree cover perished.9, (A Gha is a global hectare, meaning the biologically productive hectare with the worlds average biological productivity per year.10). Sub-continental-scale carbon stocks of individual trees in African But the science behind the campaign, a study that claims 1 trillion trees can significantly reduce greenhouse gases, is disputed. The public will also be able to assess the impact of their own back garden. There are also deeper problems, because trees have more than one way to affect the climate. Trees With Blue Leaves (Blue Pine Tree Guide: Locations, Species, Growing Instructions) Most trees have green leaves because of a substance called chlorophyll. The lead author of that study, however, cautions against pitting all tree planting efforts against forest conservation. Ecologists overwhelmingly agree forests have an important role to play in climate crisis mitigation alongside peatlands, wetlands and other solutions despite disagreement over the carbon accounting. Grasslands, especially waterlogged grasslands, can be shown to hold much more carbon than tree-covered landscapes if subsurface carbon is included in estimates, says Archibald. Systematic over-crediting of forest offsets. CarbonPlan. Instead of that guy from Salesforce saying, Im going to put money into planting a trillion trees, Id like him to go and say, Im going to put my money into helping indigenous people in the Amazon defend their lands, Fleischman says. Recent research shows that large areas of the American West may have permanently lost their forest cover. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director at Californias Breakthrough Institute, pointed out problems with the paper when it came out. For instance, the climate will keep changing for many decades, and this will affect trees behaviour and growth but we dont really know how yet. In fact, some planting projects are clearly legitimate without them, because they have government contracts or otherwise. He explained that saplings have also been planted in places already suffering from water scarcity. Launched in 2019, the project with support from the United Nations Environment Programme is aiming to plant 10 billion trees by 2023. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. Dave Matthews Band | Plant a Billion Trees - The Nature Conservancy The UKs Royal Society came to similar conclusions in a 2018 report on greenhouse gas removal technologies. The baseline calculations consider the average amount of carbon dioxide that would remain after a typical harvest, called common practice, guided by other forests carbon stock, or the capacity for capturing carbon dioxide, in the same region.5. With the right support we can continue to do so for generations to come, reads a statement from indigenous and community organizations from 42 countries spanning 76 percent of the worlds tropical forest in response to a report from the IPCC. A plantation site for the 10 Billion Tree Tsunami Project in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. A platform for the trillion trees community. | 1t.org Pakistan's former Inspector General of Forests Syed Mahmood Nasir agrees. 1 trillion trees really is also a symbol for ecosystem restoration, he recently said. We may need something thats ultra-large-scale industrial in 10 to 20 years.. Master Comparative Cultural Analysis (Arts and Culture) 2022 - 2024. Others thought the paper dramatically overstated where new forests could grow by including savannahs and grasslands in its artificial intelligence-derived estimate of land suitable. As an added assurance, buyers can visit the. The researchers investigated 102 million upfront IFM (improved forest management) credits, representing approximately two-thirds of Californias entire offset program. Specifically, California over-credited its forest carbon offsets program (the largest in the world, valued at $2 billion) by a shocking 29.4%.4. Carbon leakage refers to a company simply displacing their carbon dioxide instead of removing or reducing it.3 For example, imagine a corporation based in the United States. Others have attempted far more dramatic feats: in 2016 one Indian state planted 50 million trees in one day, while in July last year Ethiopia claimed to have planted 350 million in a day. The researchers really did a pretty good job, she says. Portfolio audit. Few people realize that such a change would transform Pakistan's climate, not only protecting the country from disasters but also saving millions of lives, she added. The criticism hit home and, in May 2020,Crowther's team published an extensive correction, in which they admitted that some of their headline claims were "incorrect" and that the data contained "errors". A total cumulative of 165 billion tonnes of removal will be needed by 2050 in order to align with the 1.5C pathway, according to BeZero Carbon Liked by Tarick Belahbib Ce mardi 4 octobre 2022, le Prix Nobel de physique vient d'tre attribu alain aspect, directeur de recherche CNRS mrite au Laboratoire If successful, the platform could help move away from the carbon in, carbon out logic underlying many conservation projects. 1t.org is part of the World Economic Forum's efforts to accelerate nature-based solutions and was set up to . However, simply stopping all our emissions is no longer enough. However, there are also surprise benefits of planting trees. Scientists have begun their own public relations battle against numbers-driven, large-scale tree planting. If you plant trees there, youre losing livelihoods, youre losing future opportunities, and youre damaging natural biodiversity., Many planting proponents acknowledge that trees can have negative effects, but that putting the right trees in the right places can sequester carbon, rebuild forests, and enhance agricultural productivity. Then, the analysts find the difference between the forests current and future carbon stocks (after implementing IFM). Kathleen Smart, a post-doctoral researcher at Rhodes University in South Africa, says that replacing surfaces like grasslands or deserts which, being pale, reflect more solar radiation into outer space with relatively dark-colored tree plantations can have a heating effect on a local level, and that regional-scale land-use changes have been shown to affect climate and rainfall patterns. Laptop and Screen: 691 kgs of CO 2 e; Desktop and Two Screens: 903 kgs of CO 2 e; Laptop, Screen at Office, and Screen at Home: 928 kgs of CO 2 e; and. Planting trees can help with both, he says, but only if we do it right. More about Adam Welz, Never miss a feature! About Us | 8 Billion Trees That is a little over half our annual emissions, but they emphasise that many of the strategies they studied would not be cost-effective: a more plausible figure would be 11-15 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. Tree planting is not an alternative to mitigation.. Uniting One World with 8 Billion Trees - UNA-USA In 2014, a province of Pakistan launched a Billion Tree Tsunami planting project, which was expanded into a nationwide 10-Billon Tree Tsunami project in 2018. Although a leading justification for tree planting is carbon sequestration, a growing number of ecologists say many projects will not create reliable carbon stores and may actually make global warming worse. We are at that point of urgency with our planet.. part one, a global review of tree-planting initiatives. The study found that the number of trees on the planet since the dawn of agriculture 12,000 years ago has fallen by almost halfand that about 10 billion trees are lost every year. Mahmood Nasir believes any plant that is grown outside its natural biome is expensive and environmentally disastrous. In India, leading environmental groups opposed a project to plant 2 billion trees in the Cauvery river basin supported by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. Wang Jiang/VCG via Getty Images. The study also looked at regions that were best able to stop that from happening, and found that indigenous territories had the best success rates. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video. As a result the great ice sheets are melting, contributing to rising seas, and extreme weather events like hurricanes and droughts are becoming more severe. He takes full responsibility for the failures, and, with a team of researchers, has been re-doing the analysis with a different approach. 8 billion trees criticism - fortune-club33.com David 'Simon - Moses' BRAVE. Its growing population needs resources that are depleting fast but given that the country is facing increasingly variable monsoons, receding Himalayan glaciers and extreme events including floods and droughts, meeting those challenges will prove extremely difficult. The Amazon now releases more carbon dioxide than it stores, in large part due to forest loss from mining, logging, agriculture, and fires. They also highlighted multiple mistakes. Additionality means that the offset project prevents a certain amount of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. Crowther demonstrates this over Zoom by highlighting his mothers garden in Cardiff and pointing out the native plant species she could introduce, and the gardens carbon sequestration potential. She also claimed that if the project succeeds, it could change local rainfall patterns. A study published in July 2019, led by Thomas Crowther of ETH-Zurich in Switzerland, estimated the world has room for an extra 0.9. Everyone with a smartphone will be able to show where their purchases came from, says Crowther. By restoring forests in an area roughly the size of China, the press release accompanying the paper suggested two-thirds of all emissions from human activities still present in the atmosphere could be removed. Conserving, restoring and growing 1 trillion trees by 2030. Death 8 APR 1905 - Amsterdam,North Holland . About Terrapass | The Terrapass story and who we are. Pakistan: Environmentalists slam '10 billion trees' project This, to many, smacked of colonialism: By not excluding conservation areas and traditional rangelands, they say, these maps promote the idea that Africas natural heritage can be turned into industrial tree plantations to offset the rich worlds carbon emissions. . The other thing trees do is emit volatile chemicals into the air. We are aware of no other viable climate change solution that is quantitatively as large in terms of carbon drawdown, the authors from the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich said in their comments published in Science last October. Earlier this year, he launched the platform Restor his lifes vision which brings together the latest data and thousands of conservation projects in a Google Maps of biodiversity. This difference in value tells officials the number of carbon credits the buyer receives upfront. Because of this, the report has larger implications for the carbon marketplace at large. Barend 'Abraham' COZIJN. It inspired the World Economic Forums (WEF) One Trillion Trees Initiative, launched last year after Salesforce billionaire Marc Benioff read the paper on the recommendation of Al Gore, the former US vice-president. The reports authors stated, We found evidence that the vast majority of projects were over-credited: for these projects, common practice values are systematically low because they reflect averages based on dissimilar species types.. Prevention Platform. April8,2021, In late January, the multibillionaire Elon Musk took to Twitter and abruptly announced, Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology. Women participating in Ethiopias mass tree-planting campaign in Addis Ababa last June. If the issue did arise, the fault would lie with that individual business, not a company like Terrapass. Since the British scientist was awarded a multimillion pound long-term grant in 2018 to form the Crowther Lab, his multidisciplinary team has been trying to map the ecology of the planet. Why Some May Think Terrapass Isn't Legit - 8 Billion Trees Once theres transparency across the whole system, everyone can call you out. Nobodys against trees, said Benioff, adding, This is a time of action, not words. Read more. If there should be no trees, thats what you should also be restoring. The rich world, she says, is saying to poor countries, We can plant trees here, well give you money if you do plant trees here, but its up to you to decide whether its a good idea and whether its really going to fulfill your development needs.. Areas that are now used for farming such as rearing sheep on hill country can be difficult to reforest (Credit: Getty Images), The real uncertainties are not scientific, but socio-political. This practice involves increasing forests carbon dioxide storage capacity by altering forest management operations, such as the frequency of timber harvests. Between 2003 and 2016, lands under indigenous control had the smallest losses of carbon because the forest stayed intact and regrew in places that had been disturbed. It is a project typical of his bigpicture thinking in ecology partly a consequence of a near fatal stroke in his mid-20s that has helped propel the 35-year-old from a postdoctoral researcher to a leading voice, with his own lab, in just a few years. Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' to tackle climate crisis As well as the climate emergency, were facing a biodiversity crisis, says Spracklen. Ethiopia aimed to plant 5 billion seedlings in three months. All of this makes it easier to offset your carbon footprint, and aids in the pursuit of furthering the mission to heal the planet and save animals. I hate that people keep asking me: where are you going to plant these trillion trees? Crowther says. The Pakistani government claims to have already planted over a billion trees as part of its ambitious plan, as well as having created around 85,000 jobs. We now know those headlines were wrong. Veldman argued that planting trees where they dont belong can harm ecosystems, make wildfires worse, and even exacerbate global warming. There is definitely room for a trillion trees to be restored within ecosystems. Organizers of the Cauvery tree-planting project have said the criticism against it is "a baseless opinion that contains blatant untruths and loose comments with no backing in facts." It says the. Sally Archibald, an ecologist at Wits University in South Africa, says that planting enthusiasts often overlook the fact that people are using all this land that everyone thinks is available for planting trees. However, the states analytical blunder isnt representative of Terrapasss legitimacy or suspected lack thereof. Hequestioned the transparency of the publicly funded budget that does not include transport and other costs. Many do successfully achieve that. The organization began in October 2004, with the central aim of helping people reduce their cars climate impact. Protecting existing forests and planting new ones are surely good things to do. Also, planting trees is not just about stopping climate change. Volunteers plant trees on the edge of the Badain Jaran Desert on Chinas Tree-Planting Day on March 12, 2021 in Gansu Province. Earth needs our help. His critique made the case that the amount of carbon the study said 1 trillion trees could sequester was about five times too large. Jon Chambers. Image: 8 Billion Trees, FW TV - Medium If the place should be a full forest, thats the level you should be restoring. In line with this, Law has highlighted that planting rich new forests can boost local biodiversity, as well as improving water availability. This is certainly a valid concern to consider as youre shopping for carbon credits, especially since the recent reports revealing devastating truths about the carbon marketplaces dark side. Many Pashtuns grew alien eucalyptus on their pastures because it paid more than the traditional rentals. Since the project has no substantial value, this renders the sold carbon credits useless. The official criticized the lack of accountability and said that a number of people close to the chambers of power have set up nurseries from which the government buys the trees for planting. The carbon marketplace is one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate climate change effects. The authors of the contested study stand by their work. Researchers can map where projects are taking place and help prevent duplication, says Crowther. When we asked them about their decision to do this, they gave us a candid response: World's #1 Fraud. Even the UKs Daily Mail, a right-wing newspaper not known for its climate activism, has just launched a campaign encouraging all its readers to plant a tree. This adds to the logistical costs which are coming out of the public coffers. Thats been kind of a red herring thats held out there a lot, says Law. Instead, it is a social enterprise with a strong focus on awareness campaigns which means their administrative costs are too high to be a charity. A plantation site for the 10 Billion Tree Tsunami Project in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Retrieved July 17, 2021, from: https://www.terrapass.com/portfolio-audits, 8Irfan, U. He is credited as an inspiration for the WEFs 1t.org project and sits on its advisory council. So we, as scientists who disagree, are now working to identify valuable ecosystems where planting trees would be a bad idea.. Others say this problem is overblown. Researchers have identified South Africa's Kruger National Park (seen here) as suitable for planting trees, even though it is mostly a natural open savanna ecosystem. If a project does not have additionality, it means that the carbon dioxide would have been removed from the atmosphere one way or another. Experts believe planting trees can be good for nature but doing so without due consideration can have negative effects. In this case, it merely leaked carbon dioxide to foreign locations. Benioff views Crowther as a Steve Jobs of ecology, an ecopreneur who is using bold research to shine a light on natures potential to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. Just a couple things at the top today, and then I look forward to taking your questions. a film arguing for extra protections for the worlds forests, The UK government has planted millions of trees over the last decade, in 2016 one Indian state planted 50 million trees in one day, Ethiopia claimed to have planted 350 million in a day, a campaign encouraging all its readers to plant a tree, remove a quarter of the carbon dioxide currently in the air, the global total of 41 billion tonnes of CO2, one of the most effective carbon drawdown solutions to date, Crowther's team published an extensive correction, the best place to plant new trees is the tropics, we have created a cooling effect that slightly offset the warming from greenhouse gas emissions, a more plausible figure would be 11-15 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, natural climate solutions could mop up about 30% of the CO2 we need to deal with every year, a 2018 report on greenhouse gas removal technologies, planting trees in dry areas can cause water scarcity because they suck up so much, enabling more plant growth and therefore more carbon storage, planting rich new forests can boost local biodiversity, Similar conflicts over land use exist in all countries. People who live alongside and depend on the river would be affected too, says Prakash Kashwan, a political science professor at the University of Connecticut.