TREE COVER - Heading in the Wrong Direction !
It has not been a good year for trees. We have lost vast tracts of tropical rainforest in Brazil. In fact, deforestation has risen by almost a third this year to 9,762 Sq Km, the size of Devon and Cornwall combined. Lost more in a year than in the last ten years.
Moving to S.E. Asia and the story is equally grim, the forests of Borneo, Malaysia and Indonesia to name just a few, continue to be devastated. We are destroying the planet and our ecosystem at a faster rate than ever before. For a longer perspective consider that Borneo, the third largest island on the planet, has now only half of it’s forest cover remaining today, down from 75% in the mid 1980s.
To all this woeful destruction of our rainforests we have to watch forests in Australia , Spain and California being destroyed by fire.
We have to ask if there is a “ tipping point” from which we cannot return. Can we reach a state of affairs where we have lost so much tree cover that global warming accelerates and we continue to lose more and more trees from fires. In effect, we could enter a tail-spin of spiralling destruction and accelerating global warming.
Is this just too alarmist ? Only today (26/11/19) do we learn that greenhouse gases have hit a new high. Concentrations of carbon Dioxide, the main driver of global warming, reached new highs of 407.8 parts per million (ppm).
We could look on the bright side of course, just sit on our hands and hope all the new forest fires are put out by all the new floods. However, satellites now show us that the Earth is hit by lightning fifty times every second, so we might struggle to deal with more wildfires in the future ?
“There is a magic machine that sucks carbon out of the air, costs very little and builds itself. It’s called a tree”. George Monbiot
And finally,
I commend to you a short film made by George Monbiot and Greta Thunberg