News

Title Lessons from the rush to reforest

Body When an international team of scientists announced in 2019 the potential
of restoring forests to slow climate change, the world grabbed shovels.
Tree-planting initiatives sprang up from Ethiopia to Nepal, spurred by
corporations eager to sponsor them.

Combined with projects already in the works, the planters included

villagers in Indonesia, drones dropping mangrove saplings in Myanmar,
and dogs scattering seeds in Chile. Their efforts have coalesced under a
collective goal to plant one trillion trees by 2030.

The 1t.org initiative, launched in 2020 by the World Economic Forum,

joins Trillion Trees and other plans in upping the ante from the 2006
Billion Tree campaign. Today’s reforestation fervour reflects growing
global anxiety over our warming world.

Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, storms are becoming more
extreme, and forest fires more frequent and hotter. The proffered
solution, outlined in eloquent simplicity by the team of researchers in
their study published in Science, is compelling.

Planting 900 million hectares of forest on degraded land, around a trillion

trees, has the potential to store an equivalent of 25 per cent of the
current atmospheric carbon pool – enough to help keep the world under
the 1.5C temperature increase called for in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Despite the enthusiasm, achieving this goal is anything but simple. In

some cases, reforestation could do more harm than good: poorly planned
and hastily executed projects may increase greenhouse gas releases and
harm people and biodiversity.

Much can be learnt from the mistakes and successes of the past. They
show the crucial importance of choosing the right plants for the right
location – increasingly difficult as the planet warms – and ensuring local
communities are at the centre of programs to plant and care for the
growing forests.

Learning from the past, protecting what we have

Climate change is the latest global crisis to spur massive reforestation
efforts. Intense fighting during the first world war left the landscape of
northeastern France so devastated that to pilots overflying it resembled a
moonscape.

After the war, the government planted 36 million trees in what came to
be known as the Verdun forest. Today, these stands support a variety of
plants, including rare orchids, newts and frogs, among them yellow-
bellied toads, which are protected by EU law.

Not all post-war plantings were as beneficial. After the second world war,
the Japanese government mounted an ambitious tree-planting effort to
protect the nation’s steep hillsides from landslides and restock its primary
building material, badly depleted by the war.

They chose two native conifers, replacing — and in some cases cutting
down — broadleaf native trees with fast-growing evergreens. The forests
that eventually blanketed nearly half of Japan’s total timbered area
formed an environment all but devoid of biodiversity.

Protecting existing forests is a primary goal of reforestation campaigns,

says Nicole Schwab, co-director of 1t.org, the World Economic Forum’s
trillion trees platform.

Half the trees that once covered the planet since the start of civilisation
have been lost, mostly to the expansion of agriculture. Between 2014 and
2018, old-growth tropical forests were destroyed at an average annual
rate of 860,000 hectares; tropical deforestation has accelerated by 44 per
cent in the last decade. This means huge carbon emissions.

The mantra of 1t.org, “conserve, restore, grow,” is backed up by

governments around the world committed to conserving the forests they
have, and by a growing number of companies. “It’s not about planting, it’s
about growing,” Schwab said. Ultimately those country pledges come
down to political will.

In Brazil, the government began aggressively expanding its conservation

programmes in 2002. Some parks and wilderness areas were put under
protection and given greater resources for enforcement. Other regions
were handed over to indigenous people to manage.

The result was an 80 per cent reduction in deforestation from 2004 to

2019. Then, Jair Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, and in the year
that followed scientists documented over a million hectares of forest loss
in Brazil, the highest rate since 2008.

Halting deforestation is critical. But the IPCC’s calculations for limiting

warming to 1.5C also depend on restoring tree coverage across those 900
million hectares of degraded land mentioned earlier. Done properly,
reforestation could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon, according to the
authors of the Science study.

Despite great enthusiasm for planting trees at national, state and local
levels, some projects are proceeding without the commitment to science
required for long-term success.

In Karnataka, southwest India, local conservationists have opposed a plan

to plant two billion trees in the Cauvery River basin.

Such a monoculture would dry up streams and destroy already

threatened habitat, they say. “Even when tree planting is taken up in the
most appropriate way… there is a critical need to stop mindless
destruction of forests and watersheds of the Cauvery, which is taking
place extensively… in the name of ‘development,’” said Leo F. Saldanha,
writing for the Coalition for Environmental Justice in India.

Along with Japan after the second world war, there are other precedents
for monoculturist mistakes. For over a century, vast swaths of the
American West have been planted, often with just one species, in 12-foot
(3.6-metre) rows that look and grow more like corn than the species-rich,
spatially diverse forests they replace.

The damage goes beyond the loss of wildlife that thrive in the native
mixed-conifer stands. There’s growing evidence that monoculture
plantations may contribute to some of the extreme fire behaviour the
West has seen in recent years, said Malcolm North, a US Forest Service
research scientist.

The 2013 Rim fire, for example, burned through 25-year-old Ponderosa
pine stands in a reforestation project designed by Forest Service officials.
These young, same-age, same-species trees are highly flammable, North
said, and contributed to the conditions that caused the blaze to explode
over two days, eventually blackening 104,000 hectares.

Today, American Forests, a US-based forest conservation organisation, is

treating every reforestation project as a learning lab – integrating the
science about how the climate is changing, what makes tree species
resilient, and how best to distribute them over a given area.

According to Jad Daley, president and CEO of American Forests, we are at

a unique moment of hope and empowerment that demands on-the-
ground science, indigenous knowledge and long-term commitment to
counter the paralysing fear of climate change.

“If we do it right — if we pick the right places and get the scientific details
right — we can replant forests that simultaneously address our climate
crisis, our biodiversity crisis and our water crisis,” said Daley, who also co-
leads the US chapter of 1t.org.

Putting communities at the heart of reforestation

Reforesters around the world have been learning from their mistakes.
Take China as an example. Few conservation campaigns have generated
as much enthusiasm as China’s Great Green Wall program when it was
launched in 1978.

The goal was to reforest 35 million hectares, an area the size of Germany,
to help reduce seasonal sandstorms sweeping out of the Gobi Desert. But,
within 25 years, most of the trees were dead or dying. “They didn’t know
any better,” Hou Yuanzhou, a forestry expert, told China Dialogue in a
2014 interview. “Nobody knew how to plant a shelterbelt, and if anyone
did know, nobody would listen to them.”

The plants were cut from quick-growing poplar and were soon riddled
with Asian long-horn beetles feasting on their soft pulp. Planting
continued despite losses as great as half of what went into the ground.

Yet the project did have some success. Since 1978, forest coverage has
officially increased from 12 per cent to almost 22 per cent, making China a
world leader in converting bare land into forest. With a little more
knowledge and long-term thinking, however, the rewards would have
been even greater, with greater sandstorm prevention, carbon storage
and habitat.

Today, China promises to do just that, through projects including the

Millennium Forest project, endorsed by President Xi Jinping, which mixes
more than 100 types of trees in a plan to cover 40 per cent of the
Xiong’an New Area near Beijing by 2035.

Such biodiverse forests can hold 32 tons of carbon per hectare, nearly
three times the storage of a comparable monoculture stand. China alone
has accounted for 25 per cent of the global increase in leaf area since
2000, despite representing just 6.6 per cent of the world’s vegetated land.
About half of that is from an increase in forests, with a third due to more
cropland.

The main measure of success for any reforestation project is whether the
trees survive in the long term. This depends on support from local
communities.

One locally-driven project in Madagascar could provide a model. Since

2002, the oldest island in the world has lost about one-fifth of its tree
cover, primarily to expanding agriculture.

The village of Andasibe, three hours east of the country’s capital, contains
an especially rich assemblage of endemic species that has made it a
popular tourist destination. In 1999, a union of local wildlife guides
formed Mitsinjo, an association dedicated to tapping into this biodiversity
 to benefit both economic and ecosystem resilience. Mitsinjo began
training local people as nature tourism guides.

Those with particular knowledge of forests are assisting visiting scientists

from all over the world. Some are former lemur hunters who now use
their skills to protect these endangered species, said Rainer Dolch, a
Mitsinjo spokesman. School kids are planting trees in logged areas.

The association has also helped protect 10,000 hectares of the greatest
conservation importance. These projects are providing direct and indirect
income to several hundred families for activities that conserve forests and
their wildlife, Dolch added.

While the future of Mitsinjo is not assured, its potential to succeed lies in
the participation of local communities. “Earning the trust of local
communities and not letting them down is probably the most important
prerequisite for successful community-based natural resource
management,” said Dolch.

Like Madagascar’s pioneering project, the potential of worldwide

reforestation to reduce carbon emissions is promising but precarious.
Monoculture planting is still the norm throughout the American West and
beyond. Old-growth stands continue to fall to chainsaws in Brazil and
beyond.

The talents and investment of communities in local forests continue to be

ignored. Trees — even planting a trillion of them — will not stop climate
change, but we won’t reach our climate and biodiversity objectives
without them.

The recent attention to conserving old-growth forests and planting new

ones may indicate a shift in focus that allows trees to play their natural
role as anchors of ecosystems and ecosystem services. That shift in our
mindset is what will save us, said Schwab. “It’s just a matter of will – and
courage.”

Excerpt Tree-growing projects must match the right species with the right
location, and put local communities at the front and centre of operations.
Publish date 11 May 2021
Type World news
Source https://www.eco-business.com/news/lessons-from-the-rush-to-reforest/
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Title Carbon Sequestration Will Not Save Us

Body As Farber University’s slogan argues in the classic spoof “Animal House”
— “knowledge is good.” Would you therefore favor spending taxpayer
money to study better ways to sweep dirt under the nearest carpet?
Such research would produce knowledge. But why study how to do what
shouldn’t be done in the first place?

President Biden’s proposed infrastructure program includes money to

study new ways to do “carbon sequestration.” The goal would be to
capture carbon dioxide produced by burning coal, oil, or natural gas and
stash it somewhere rather than letting it escape into the atmosphere. This
would allow continued use of these fuels without increasing the danger of
a runaway climate.

We should not be spending any money to study this kind of carbon

sequestration, which amounts to a large-scale sweeping of dirt under the
“carpet.”

Our massive burning of coal, oil and natural gas to produce energy for
current consumption is using up valuable assets that it took the natural
world millions of years to produce. Coal, oil and gas are not just sources
of energy; they can be valuable inputs for the chemical industry. We are
squandering humanity’s natural birthright.

Carbon sequestration would also pile up dangerous liabilities for many

future generations, again in order to allow production of energy for
current use. To use a “balance sheet” analogy from accounting, both
using up assets and increasing liabilities would reduce our “owner’s
equity” in natural resources. It would leave a poorer world for our heirs,
our children and grandchildren.

Remember that carbon dioxide is CO2 — two atoms of oxygen for every
atom of carbon. So sequestration would also be removing oxygen —
essential for human life — permanently from the atmosphere. There
would likely still be enough oxygen left, but this would be a step in the
wrong direction.

More importantly, the sequestered carbon dioxide — huge amounts of it

— would have to be stored somewhere. Presumably it would be injected
into underground areas where, theoretically, it couldn’t get back out.

But how much do we want to gamble that theories telling us this are
correct? On August 21, 1986 Lake Nyos in Africa belched out a huge cloud
of carbon dioxide that had accumulated at its bottom. Since carbon
dioxide is heavier than normal air, it pooled near the ground and killed
1,746 nearby people and about 3,500 cattle by depriving them of oxygen.

A similar burp of sequestered carbon dioxide near a major population

center could kill millions of people in a few minutes.
 In any event, it is unlikely that carbon dioxide could be captured from
power plants without driving the cost of electricity sky high, since the
capture process itself would undoubtedly require large amounts of
electricity.

The money needed to study sequestration could better be spent to

increase reforestation work in the U.S. and in other countries. Trees, like
all other plants, actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,
incorporate the carbon into themselves and release oxygen into the
atmosphere. This approach to protecting the atmosphere was discussed
extensively at the recent climate summit, but it could always use more
financial support.

Or the extra money could be spent on transitioning from carbon fuels to

solar energy, which is already cheaper than those fuels.

Spending taxpayer money to study new ways to do carbon sequestration

is a terrible idea. Nevertheless, it may be reasonable to include this small
part of the proposed American Jobs Act (the official name for the
administration’s infrastructure proposals).

President Biden wants to get his proposals enacted into law and including
money for this research may give needed cover for representatives and
senators, especially those from coal-producing states, to support its
enactment.

Excerpt We should not be spending any money to study this kind of carbon
sequestration, which amounts to a large-scale sweeping of dirt under the
“carpet.”

Publish date 11 May 2021

Type World news
Source https://www.laprogressive.com/carbon-sequestration-will-not-save-us/
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Title Bill Caplan has way to fight climate change — now

Body The debate over the existence of man-made climate change is all but
settled — 97 percent of climate scientists agree on this, according to
NASA. And for the past few years, many policymakers — especially of the
Democratic persuasion — have called it an existential threat.

The last four years under President Donald Trump didn’t help as the
unpopular leader actively dismantled policies meant to slow down or
even reverse the effects of global warming, all while promoting the
production of coal and other fossil fuels responsible for the carbon
dioxide emissions that create it in the first place.
Environmentalists expect this to change, however, now that Joe Biden has
moved into the White House, noting climate change as a key part of his
agenda. His environmental plan aims to cut in half carbon emissions from
2005 by the end of the decade.

Bill Caplan isn’t as impressed as he’d like to be.

“Well, that’s very nice,” he said. “But what do we do until we get there
when climate change is happening now?” — all caused by the
concentration of carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere.

It was a question inspiring Caplan to write his new book, “Thwart Climate
Change Now: Reducing Embodied Carbon Brick by Brick,” slated for a fall
release. It’s Caplan’s third book following “Buildings are for People” in
2016 and “Contrasts 21c” in 2018.

Caplan is an engineer by trade who became passionate about the climate

crisis later in life. Growing up in Brooklyn, he’s lived in Riverdale since the
early 1980s.

After graduating from Cornell University in Ithaca, he founded Entran

Devices — a company that made high-tech miniature sensing devices for
the military. After 34 years leading the company, Caplan sold it in 2005 for
$9.5 million.

He changed careers, enrolling in architecture school at the Pratt Institute,

located in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn.

“I was doing that, basically, not to build houses in the Hamptons, but to
get a better understanding of how architects work,” Caplan said.
“Because there’s something lacking in this country in terms of building
design, sustainability and everything. So, I wanted to see from the inside
what was going on.”

Using his engineering background, Caplan discovered efforts to teach

architects about energy-efficient design didn’t add up. It alerted him to
the broader misconceptions architects, policy makers and even the
general public have when it comes to actually cutting carbon emissions.

A good portion of his latest book, Caplan said, is devoted to educating

people about “embodied carbon” while reframing discussions about how
to best combat climate change. The first lesson? Realizing that cutting
carbon emissions in the future is not the only way to fight climate change.
And even then, those efforts could take several decades to achieve.

“The scientific agreement is we don’t have those decades to spare,”

Caplan said. “Consensus is telling us that we have 10 to 15 years to really
clamp down on our emissions. And so that is what this book is addressing:
The reality of what we’re facing. And it’s really focusing a lot on what is
being ignored.”

That’s where embodied carbon comes in. It’s the carbon footprint of
everything humans produce, Caplan says, like buildings, cars — pretty
much any product.

The large amount of embodied carbon that comes from manufacturing is

seldom considered by policymakers when they think about how to
mitigate the effects of climate change. However, some lawmakers have
pushed efforts more recently to address such environmental impacts
through bills like state Sen. Todd Kaminsky’s “producer responsibility” bill
intended to shift the cost of environmental impacts back to
manufacturers.

“The serious nature of this carbon footprint is that these are emissions
that are going into our atmosphere, sometimes years before we use
anything,” Caplan said. “And so these emissions are basically taken for
granted.”

Embodied carbon makes up a serious portion of emissions, Caplan said,

with as much as 40 percent of greenhouse gases coming from buildings
and construction, as well as the emissions from operating those buildings.
Cement production alone accounts for 7 percent of energy-related
emissions.

Even products designed to help the environment like solar panels and
electric cars emit embodied carbons. While policymakers may think this
technology is the answer to environmental issues, Caplan says the carbon
impact from manufacturing both could offset any gains from using the
technology.

For example, rooftop solar panels are manufactured in a way that is not
exactly environmentally friendly. That’s why Caplan believes they should
only be installed in parts of the country where they’ll make enough
carbon-free energy over a 10-year period to offset its embodied carbon.

“If you get down into the south, or sunny areas in California, there’s a big
gain,” Caplan said. “But if you go into upstate New York or even New York
City — where there’s a lot of shade from buildings — then the bottom line
is, it’s a mistake to put some of those solar panels up. Because we’re
going to be adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere now to make
them.”

But towns or regions creating solar farms could see significant

environmental benefits, especially compared to rooftop solar.
 Caplan says his book is not just about pointing out problems with
embodied carbon emissions, but how their negative impact can be
mitigated.

For instance, because concrete is such a high emitter of embodied carbon,

Caplan recommends cutting back on using it for aesthetic purposes when
constructing homes and buildings. Another solution is to introduce a new
carbon emissions labeling system for products.

If nothing else, when it’s all said and done, Caplan wants readers to
understand why embodied carbon emissions need to be reduced now,
and not wait for another decade.

“It’s important to me to somehow try to awaken people — policymakers

and architects — to what has to be done now,” Caplan said.

“Do I think that I’ll succeed in my message? No. But that doesn’t stop me
from trying.”
Excerpt “If you get down into the south, or sunny areas in California, there’s a big
gain,” Caplan said. “But if you go into upstate New York or even New York
City — where there’s a lot of shade from buildings — then the bottom line
is, it’s a mistake to put some of those solar panels up. Because we’re
going to be adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere now to make
them.”
Publish date 11 May 2021
Type World news
Source https://riverdalepress.com/stories/bill-caplan-has-way-to-fight-climate-
change-now,74476?
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