Would a massive world-wide afforestation project help alleviate global warming?
Answer:
The woman who stnick_motown03 is referring to is Wangari Maathai. She won the nobel peace prize for her tree planting initiatives, but in actuality her methodology is flawed. Unfortunately her true identity is more political then environmental and as-of-such her tree planting efforts are big PR moves where she distributes free trees to rural communities in Kenya. Sounds great yeah? Well people in Kenya are generally quite poor and without an aspect of education and an investment cost you can follow in Maathai's footsteps and see a preponderance of dead trees in her wake. To have a rural farmer nurture these trees it is not good enough to get hundreds of people to dig holes as part of a public spectacle and then drop undefined tree species into the vacant holes. Instead these same farmers must be educated on the value of trees so that they actually want to see them to maturity to reap their benefits. It is also important that they are not free. Subsidized pricing is fine, but a farmer must fork over some of the investment so that if the tree does die there is a cost to them as well. Even at only 20 cents per tree, to lose five trees would represent an entire day's income as the average Kenyan income for the rural poor is about 1 dollar per day. If a few minute a day can mean the difference between a secondary income versus the loss of the investment value of a day's wage per every 5 trees you can be sure what the status of the majority of those trees will be after their delicate first year after planting.
Let me give you an example. Before I started my community development project in Kenya my first personal agroforestry project involved planting 314 mango trees on my farm. If a mango tree can survive its first year it becomes drought resistant and requires very little care after that. A lot of my wealthier neighbours attempted fruit crops but discovered that their workers allowed most of their trees to fail, which didn't surprise me given that these wealthier neighbours are frequently vacant from their farms and that their workers get paid a dollar a day or less. These same neighbours told me not to bother and reported tree loses from between 70-80% of what they planted. In reviewing their models I saw things a different way. It was a simple solution. I took my head employee and told him that I was going to offer him an opportunity. If all my trees made it to the short rains (eight months away) then I would pay him a bonus of 500 Kenya shillings (about 7US dollars) but for each tree that died I would reduce his bonus by 25 shillings. My experiment worked magnificently and I lost 0% of my trees. This is the same principal as needs to be implemented for the rural farmers. By implementing a bonus structure my worker now was forced to see my trees survival as an investment and for about 1 dollar per month extra I was able to ensure that my initial agroforestry project was a success. A rural farmer also needs to see that the trees that they are planting are their own investment and to give the trees away for free promotes a 20%-30% survival rate as opposed to the 90%-100% survival rate that should be expected by someone with an invested interest. I have now influenced the planting of tens of thousands of trees and have personally planted around 7000 trees on my own farm which is in a semi-arid region of Kenya. Within a couple years I hope to be able to expand my operation so that I'm dealing in the hundreds of thousands trees annually and then in the millions of trees.
I don't think so
WHO HAS TO DO IT?
tHE PRESENT SELFISH SOCIETY WILL NOT DO IT. THEN THE ANSWER IS IN THE FOLLOWING BOOK.
http://www.authorhouse.com/bookstore/ite...
There are actually many movements doing just that in the world today. Interestingly, North America is actually getting *more* forested every day, as is Japan and some other regions of the world. This is due to aggressive afforestation, although a great deal of that is for tree farming.
Did you know that Japan actually imports trees from the US?
Growing trees, of course, take in much more carbon dioxide per year than already towering arboreal mammoths, so aggressive reforestation isn't a bad idea. It could help, yes.
One of the things you should definitely take a look at is the use of reforestation in the politics of certain regions of Africa. I cannot recall the woman's name right now, but there was a woman in Africa who wanted to revitalize her nation's economy and revolutionize women's rights. She is achieving her goals even now through a community reforestation program that works purely on the ground level with village women. I believe they've reforested hundreds, possibly even thousands, of miles of Africa where there was once only dry lowland brush and desert.
Yes - afforestation would contribute greatly to the sequestration of carbon dioxide. However, that does not address the core problem, it merely applies a band aid to the situation. The key problem is that humans (primarily Americans) are consuming more than we need to stay alive. The fact that we have overpopulated the planet means that more humans are using way more resources (metals, minerals mined from the earth for everyday products), food (40% of food is thrown out in the USA every day), clothing (everyone has more clothes than they can wear in a day) et c...think of all the stuff people horde for no useful reason: knick knacks, collections, books, cds, toys vehicles..all of this costs the earth. Manufacturing all this stuff (to stroke our egos) costs the earth and causes global warming. We are eating up resources for no good reason. So i nthe end, planting trees will buy us some time, but what the world needs is a cultural change, a behaviour change, if we are to arrest coral reef destruction (from acidification of the oceans due to all the sewage human populations keep spewing out); reduce global warming and stop ecosystems on this planet from collapsing.
It might help. Deforestation is one of the larger contributors. Since deforestation is primarily a result of population increase, maybe population decrease combined with Afforestation would be even better.
Deforestation is about 18% of the CO2 production. See the link.
Here is another related way to curb global warming.
The raising of cattle for beef consumption causes more global warming than all of the cars exhaust on this planet. It starts with thousands of sq. miles of tropical rainforest being cut down and burned to raise much of the cattle. Then the amount of methane gas(a global warming gas) that is expelled by cattle. 100 million tons of methane gas a year is expelled by cattle just in the U.S. alone. The amount of water to raise these cattle is beyond belief also. It takes about 20 acres of land a year to supply the protein a person needs by eating beef and over 2500 gallons of water. For a vegetarian it takes 1 acre of land to supply the protein they need for one year and about 40 gallons of water. Stop eating beef and you will be doing more to stop global warming than many other opitions.
yes, forestation could help the environment in many ways, including by helping to alleviate global warming. it can also help stop erosion, restore habitat, and help in other ways.
Did you Bump Your Head
Maybe not; but it would be most desirable in many other ways. Given the best of modern technology, the will and the political agreement, could not the Sahara be greened? That would be a better idea for now than thinking of terraforming Mars.
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