8 billion trees criticism

The UKs Royal Society came to similar conclusions in a 2018 report on greenhouse gas removal technologies. In fact, some planting projects are clearly legitimate without them, because they have government contracts or otherwise. You have to be careful where you do reforestation, says David Beerling of the University of Sheffield in the UK. Earth needs our help. The study also considered planting trees on savannas and grasslands, where planting non-native trees could cause problems for local species. 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. Government supporters are benefitting from the project, the official claimed. Abbas says that in a particular desert area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, one sapling needs a one-off provision of 15 rupees worth of water. Experts believe planting trees can be good for nature but doing so without due consideration can have negative effects. The Pakistani government's plan to plant 10 billion trees has garnered national and international praise. Restoring the worlds forests, wetlands and natural landscapes is an end in itself, Crowther is keen to emphasise, and carbon sequestration is not the primary focus. The hope is that they will save us from the worst effects of climate change. The current focus on trees rather than grasses is partly a result of technological limitations: Its far easier and cheaper to measure above-ground carbon held in vegetation than carbon held below-ground in soil. "I have seen the planting of thousands of trees in my own area," she said. Carbon offset transparency | Project standards. Youre going to max out pretty soon if you only try to use forests. Non-native eucalyptus and pine species are commonly used in tree planting projects worldwide because they grow fast in a range of climates, but the fact that so-called ecological restoration projects are planting billions of these saplings makes no sense to ecologists who have witnessed their negative impacts. Reforestation was a potent tool for climate crisis mitigation, just less so than initially suggested, and certainly not a replacement for decarbonisation. Forest Atlas. Planting trees, the team wrote, is one of the most effective carbon drawdown solutions to date. 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. After the initial media blitz rallied excitement for the seemingly simple climate solution, a group of 46 scientists, including Fleischman, responded to the study with their critique. Prevention Platform. In July 2019, the British ecologist co-authored. It claimed that planting a trillion trees could capture more than a third of all the greenhouse gases humans have released since the industrial revolution. In Cambodia, a Battered Mekong Defies Doomsday Predictions, How Weather Forecasts Can Help Dams Supply More Water, In Scramble for Clean Energy, Europe Is Turning to North Africa, As Millions of Solar Panels Age Out, Recyclers Hope to Cash In. 8 Billion Trees is a Business that is Prioritizing the Cause of Actually Planting 8 Billion Trees Around The World, While Setting the Example of How a Cause Centric Business Can Succeed LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / February 14, 2019 /The founders of 8 Billion Trees are pleased to announce the launch of a new company that has one simple mission: to change the world, one tree at a time. She also claimed that if the project succeeds, it could change local rainfall patterns. 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 Crowther Lab, a research group at ETH Zrich, a Swiss research university, published a similar map in a 2019 Science paper titled The global tree restoration potential, which identified 900 million hectares of land available globally for new tree cover. 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. A plantation site for the 10 Billion Tree Tsunami Project in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. As soon as you get down onto the land, theres people living there and they have aspirations for how they want to live their lives that maybe dont involve tree-planting, says Spracklen. "Future papers in the series will build on the foundation of counting trees, extend the areas studied, and look ways to calculate their carbon content," said Tucker. 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". Reforestation is seen as a way to help cool the climate, sucking excess warming carbon out of the atmosphere. This causes a net increase in GHG emissions, but the company appears to have lowered their carbon output. Thats been kind of a red herring thats held out there a lot, says Law. 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. For them, the government has taken positive action in the right direction. Ethiopia aimed to plant 5 billion seedlings in three months. Are Huge Tree Planting Projects More Hype than Solution? The team estimated that the natural climate solutions could lock up the equivalent of 23.8 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. Grasses are also less vulnerable to destruction by fire, drought, and disease. 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 billion hectares of forest. 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. So how much can trees really help us solve our climate problem? Using powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms, the team mapped the crown diameter - the width of a tree when viewed from above - of more than 1.8 billion trees across an area of more than 500,000 square miles, or 1,300,000 square kilometers. 1t.org is part of the World Economic Forum's efforts to accelerate nature-based solutions and was set up to . All Rights Reserved, By submitting your email, you agree to our. 8 Billion Trees was born on November 10th, 2018. The fifth most populous country in the world with over 24% of its people living in poverty, Pakistan is one of the states most vulnerable to the changing climate. Usman Ashraf, now a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, documented how Pakistans mega tree-planting drive destroyed the traditional livelihoods of the nomadic Gujjar people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. 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. The study, led by Jean-Franois Bastin, a postdoctoral researcher at Crowthers lab in ETH Zrich, Switzerland, was the second most featured climate paper in the media in 2019, according to one analysis. The carbon marketplace is one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate climate change effects. He points to the Welsh hills, which are severely deforested and consequently lacking in wildlife but which are politically difficult to reforest because they are dominated by the sheep-farming industry. The organization began in October 2004, with the central aim of helping people reduce their cars climate impact. Any organization enrolled in a carbon offset program with genuine climate-friendly goals would try to prevent this. Nature has its own mechanism for planting trees and you do not need to plant and look after them," the former forestry official said. She points out that the polar regions are warming faster than the rest of the planet, so much of the snow may melt in the coming decades in which case planting trees will not make the ground that much darker. The solution is to stop emitting all greenhouse gases, for instance by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources like solar power. part one. But a growing number of scientists are warning that these massive projects can wreck natural ecosystems, dry up water supplies, damage agriculture, and push people off their land. The first issue is that trees are dark, at least compared to other things that might blanket the land, such as grass or snow. Everyone with a smartphone will be able to show where their purchases came from, says Crowther. Additionality means that the offset project prevents a certain amount of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. Death 8 APR 1905 - Amsterdam,North Holland . The mutual relationships between forests and climate are actually really rather more complex and not fully understood, Unger told the James Lovelock Centenary conference at the University of Exeter in July 2019. Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the copyright act 1976, allowance is made for fair use for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, sch. 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. But its not always that simple. They also crowd out native species and increase the fuel available to wildfires, making these more dangerous. The implications go beyond the states borders, affecting many well-known organizations in the offsets industry. We may need something thats ultra-large-scale industrial in 10 to 20 years.. His lab has about 30 staff and an in-house public relations unit, and Crowther himself speaks on high-profile stages like TED and has access to wealthy businesspeople and top politicians. The platform is focused on signing up NGOs initially about 30,000 so far, with tens of thousands in the process of being uploaded. However, the states analytical blunder isnt representative of Terrapasss legitimacy or suspected lack thereof. Glossary. But since the study was published, it has faced intense scientific criticism. 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. Minasse Wondimu Hailu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images. The UK government has planted millions of trees over the last decade, and has pledged another million between 2020 and 2024. Trees have emerged as one of the most effective methods for drawing existing carbon out of the atmosphere (Credit: Getty Images). The underlying problem is that our society is releasing greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide (CO2), that are warming the Earths climate to levels we have never experienced before. That global initiative could help his project scale this up to 50 to 60 billion trees across the country, Sadhguru said on the panel. Suddenly we are all being told to plant trees. Terrapass. There are many different reasons for this, but they all revolve around impact. However, there are also surprise benefits of planting trees. However, it does have some drawbacks. The challenge will be finding ways to fit huge new forests into our societies in such a way that people accept them. These chemicals stick together to form tiny floating particles called aerosols, which have complicated effects. Restoring forests may be one of our most powerful weapons in fighting climate change. Trees will definitely help us slow climate change, but they wont reverse it on their own. They had already issued a lengthy response to criticisms in the journal Science, explaining that they did not mean reforestation was a potential magic bullet or a substitute for reducing fossil fuel use. The founder of the foundation that launched it, yogi and author Sadhguru, joined Salesforces Benioff at a press conference for the trillion trees campaign in Davos. People are getting caught up in the wrong solution, says Forrest Fleischman, who teaches natural resources policy at the University of Minnesota and has spent years studying the effects of tree planting in India. He is credited as an inspiration for the WEFs 1t.org project and sits on its advisory council. Vox. The location, species planted, and how people are involved can all jeopardize success. Tree-planting initiatives have been further boosted by academic papers that claim enormous benefits from tree planting and maps that identify areas that could support more trees. The researchers determined this area by mapping land with sufficient rainfall to support trees, but that is not currently occupied by forests, agriculture, or urban areas. The science behind the press releases claim that new forests could suck in two-thirds of all historic human emissions remaining in the atmosphere was also questioned. In this case, the project isnt making a difference since the carbon dioxide can and will be offset without it. Tree-planting campaigns have taken off, with everyone from YouTube creators to high-powered CEOs embracing trees as a solution to the climate crisis. Restoring trees to the landscape is truly a win-win for the climate and communities but we need to start planting now for new . 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. "Administrative and other costs are not part of the allocated amount. Women participating in Ethiopias mass tree-planting campaign in Addis Ababa last June. This creates more low cloud, or thicker low cloud, which also bounces sunlight back to space. By Adam Welz April 8, 2021 The Amazon now releases more carbon dioxide than it stores, in large part due to forest loss from mining, logging, agriculture, and fires. Fossil fuel colossus Shell says that 700 million hectares of forest must be planted this century to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees C an area just smaller than Brazil. Forest carbon markets: Potential and drawbacks (RL34560). 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.. If the place should be a full forest, thats the level you should be restoring. By some estimates, trees can be an enormous carbon sink. However, simply stopping all our emissions is no longer enough. 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). 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. This led the state to set the average stock too low, causing inflated carbon credit estimations. 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. The US-based corporation might reduce the CO2 emissions of its primary location to comply with American climate policies, but ramps up operations overseas. Then, the analysts find the difference between the forests current and future carbon stocks (after implementing IFM). The researchers really did a pretty good job, she says. (2019, July 5). Make sure you get the right mix of species and the right social context and you can actually have a positive impact.. Specifically, according to a 2007 study that has been repeatedly confirmed, the best place to plant new trees is the tropics, where trees grow fastest and thus trap the most CO2. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. . In South Africa, for example, many naturally open habitats, including grasslands and heathlands, have been invaded by introduced trees like eucalyptus and acacia species from Australia and pines from the Northern Hemisphere. In 2014 Unger calculated that, by chopping down forests from 1850 to the 2000s and thus preventing them emitting volatiles, we have created a cooling effect that slightly offset the warming from greenhouse gas emissions. Trees just got a big boost at The World Economic Forum this month, when the forum announced a new initiative aimed at planting 1 trillion trees around the globe within the decade to combat climate change. The Dave Matthews Band 2023 Tour has committed to help plant an additional one million trees with The Nature Conservancy's Plant a Billion Trees program, a global forest restoration effort, having fully funded three million trees from 2020 - 2022.With your help and with commitments from the band, The Dreaming Tree Wines and other tour partners, we can help advance this goal in an effort to . "Provision of solar geysers and cooking stoves, and a restriction on tree felling in northern and northwestern areas could help a lot," he said. The reports authors state, Our analysis of crediting errors demonstrates that a large fraction of the credits in the program do not reflect real climate benefits. This means that the state overestimated its offsets by a staggering 30 million tCO2e. For instance, a 2018 study suggested that large-scale tree planting in dry tropical regions would cause a shift in weather patterns, leading to more rainfall on land enabling more plant growth and therefore more carbon storage. However, a closer look at the companys standards and practices clarifies that its one of the most trustworthy climate-focused orgs in the world. The overall effect is quite small, says Spracklen, who has studied the effects of aerosols. Because of this, some programs, such as The Nature Conservancy, have come under fire because they were protecting trees that werent actually in danger of deforestation. A plantation site for the 10 Billion Tree Tsunami Project in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. The brutal maths of climate change is that, as long as emissions are above zero, the world will continue to warm. If a person planted a tree every year for 20 years - and each one survived, which is highly unlikely - those 20 trees would take up about 1,000 pounds, or half a ton, of carbon dioxide per . In the first year alone, Terrapass gained more than 2,400 members and reduced 36 million pounds of CO2.1. Science published six critiques of the paper, criticizing its methods and results, and the Crowther Lab was forced to issue corrections. 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. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director at Californias Breakthrough Institute, pointed out problems with the paper when it came out. This implies natural climate solutions could mop up about 30% of the CO2 we need to deal with every year. As well as the climate emergency, were facing a biodiversity crisis, says Spracklen. Trees in the United States already provide $6.8 billion in health benefits every year by filtering pollution from the air, on top of additional benefits from cleaner water, wildlife habitat and forest industries. We have cared for our lands and forests and the biodiversity they contain for generations. Barend 'Abraham' COZIJN. This scatters sunlight back into space, cooling the planet. They still think forests play a role in solving the climate crisis their skepticism mostly centers around efforts to plant trees in places they werent before, or to plant large swaths of a single species to essentially create tree plantations instead of real forests. At the moment a lot of the trees being planted are monocultures of fast-growing commercial species like acacia or eucalyptus. They claimed in a letter that the campaign threatened to dry up streams and destroy habitats. For Nadine Unger of the University of Exeter in the UK, this is a major problem. China is on track to plant 35 million hectares (87 million acres) of trees in its northern arid areas by 2050 to make a so-called Great Green Wall the size of Germany. About Terrapass | The Terrapass story and who we are. Trees With Blue Leaves (Blue Pine Tree Guide: Locations, Species, Growing Instructions) Most trees have green leaves because of a substance called chlorophyll. They point to flaws in the studies that have inspired large-scale programs, and say that harmful types of tree planting are regularly conflated with beneficial natural forest restoration. When we asked them about their decision to do this, they gave us a candid response: 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. Although it would take an enormous area of new trees to measurably heat the atmosphere at a global scale, Smart says in some cases the planetary reflectance loss from new trees may outweigh carbon sequestration gains. And many struggle because they dont have the right information, adds Crowther, who is to co-chair the UNs Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Last year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) launched its 1t.org project, which aims to mobilize commitments from corporations, governments, and NGOs to conserve, restore, or grow one trillion trees by 2030. The worlds leading authority on climate science, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has recognized that when local communities land rights are jeopardized, it poses risks to both people and the planet. In India, leading environmental groups opposed a project to plant 2 billion trees in the Cauvery river basin supported by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. Government supporters have said that this will reach 31%, the global average. You can find a list of approved VVBs from several authorities like the American Carbon Registry and Verra.6. In this case, it merely leaked carbon dioxide to foreign locations. Recent years have seen massive tree-planting projects announced and rolled out. 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. Billion Tree Tsunami Programme Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The government said that the project would cost a little over 125 billion rupees ($750 million, 633 million) but critics claim that other costs are being ignored. In April of this year, Carbon Plan published a scathing report showing that forestry offsets had been severely over-credited. George Monbiot, a columnist in the UKs Guardian newspaper, has founded a campaign called Natural Climate Solutions, which advocates restoring forests and other ecosystems. New trees can either be planted in regions that have been deforested (reforestation) or in places that have never had them before (afforestation). A graduate of the German University of Heidelberg, Parveen insists that this is the first Pakistani government to take environmental issues very seriously. The researchers warn, Rather than improve forest management to store additional carbon dioxide, ecological and statistical flaws in Californias offsets program create incentives to generate credits that do not reflect real climate benefits.. World's #1 Fraud. Among them, Terrapass has faced extensive public scrutiny. Those grazing animals can help prevent wildfires, Mahmood Nasir explained. 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. Minasse Wondimu Hailu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images. You dont need to plant a tree to regenerate a forest, Fleischman tells The Verge. The criticism has hit home. Retrieved July 17, 2021, from: https://forest-atlas.fs.fed.us/benefits-carbon-stocks.html, 6Terrapass. The authors of the contested study stand by their work. Retrieved July 17, 2021, from: https://www.Terrapass.com/standards-2, 7Terrapass. Harry Beugelink via Shutterstock, But even with these caveats, Archibald says that making maps of potential tree cover like the Crowther Labs and WRIs, and offering large offset payments to developing countries to plant trees, places those nations in an unfair position. Since the project has no substantial value, this renders the sold carbon credits useless. To be clear, critics of the campaign are still fans of trees. Taking stock of carbon. 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.

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