Earth is greener than before

While the alarming rate of rain forests being cut is cause for serious concern, data shows that the earth is now much greener than what it was a decade back. According to independent.co.uk, the increase in vegetation is the result of a major tree-planting campaign in China and unintentional increase in grasslands and non-tropical forests in former Soviet states, Australia and Africa, as heavy rainfall and abandoned farms improve growing conditions. The net increase in vegetation is so substantial that the world’s trees and other plants store four billion tonnes more carbon today than they did in 2003, according to a study by the University of New South Wales and Austra-lian National University.

Plants help to combat climate change by sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and converting it into the food they need to grow, locking the carbon into their structures and helping curb global warming in the process.

“The increase in vegetation primarily came from a lucky combination of environmental and economic factors and massive tree-planting projects in China,” said the lead author, Dr Yi Liu.

“Vegetation increases on the savannahs in Australia, Africa and South America as a result of increasing rainfall, while in Russia and former Soviet republics we have seen the regrowth of massive forests on abandoned farmland.”

The growth of plant cover has also been helped by the causes and effects of climate change. The overall increase in carbon in the atmosphere over the past decade as the world burned increasing quantities of fossil fuels played a small role as the “CO2 fertilisation effect” improved the growing conditions for plants.

Furthermore, as the warming planet melts ice and permafrost in the Arctic, the “tree-line” is moving North, experts said. Pine and broadleaf forests have shown significant growth in the past 10 years, as have shrublands and savannahs. Meanwhile, grasslands and croplands showed a modest increase.

But the decline in rainforests over that period has been significant — especially around the edge of the Amazon and in Indonesia’s provinces of Sumatra and Kalimantan. Scientists say this is alarming because rainforests are much richer and more diverse habitats than grasslands and other types of forests.

Although the growth in plants provides a welcome boost in the battle to curb climate change, the report warns that the increase in the amount of carbon being sucked out of the atmosphere is nowhere near big enough to counter the overall growth in carbon emissions during the period.