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Trees alone aren't enough. For example, ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest are highly balanced ecosystems that are in a perpetual recursive loop. You can't tear them down and then rebuild them by just planting trees. The rainfall the Amazon gets is itself generated by the canopied rainforest. And you can't bring back all the diversity of life that gets lost.
And this goes for any other ecosystem.
And the staggering statistic is that only 30% of the Earth is covered by forest now, a drop from 60% prior to humans going nuts.
I think most people reading a headline about tree count would care primarily about deforestation and loss of habitat of indigenous species.
This article isn't about that, and explicitely states it doesn't touch deforestation per se, just sheer tree count, including production targeted tree farms.
TFA:
> While the classification may seem simplistic, powerful conclusions can be drawn from the data, including assessing agricultural expansion, climate-driven expansion and contraction of ecosystems, and forest clearing and recovery.
There are certainly more trees where I lived than there were a hundred years ago, but there are also more trees than there would have been a thousand years ago. I live in an area that should be natural prairie and humans have planted a lot more trees than the ecosystem would support in a natural situation.
I don't know if this is good or bad from an environment situation, but it is a part of a reason I am suspicious of claims that more trees are good.
We still need more trees! Trees do not only act as carbon storage, potentially offsetting CO2 emissions. They also provide shade, which helps mitigate the effects of global warming. Through evapotranspiration they also participate in the water cycle and help carry humidity further inland. We need more trees in our cities, we need more trees in our villages, we need more trees in our agricultural systems. Plant more trees!
> Agricultural land area expanded 7.6 percent between 1961 and 2020 and currently occupies 32 percent of the world’s land area. Irrigated area more than doubled.
Ag land expanding doesn't mean less farmland everywhere though, just net global. IIRC most of that expansion's in a few regions (Africa, South America) while US/Europe farmland's actually shrunk since the 70s. Both things true at once.
We use less farmland to produce the same thing mostly because we artificially juice land with fossil fuel derived fertilizer. Declining farmland utilization could be a good thing, but I think in most actual cases it isn't because it represents higher fossil fuel usage and more aggressive usage of the top soil, which leads to its depletion.
This could change though, with better top soil management and more green energy production to produce fertilizer without fossil fuels it could turn into a good thing in practice.
Fair, but does that article address CO2 fertilization saturating under nutrient/water limits? Fine in a greenhouse with controlled inputs, murkier in real soil where nitrogen or drought caps growth regardless of CO2 levels. Has anyone modeled where that ceiling actually sits?
Not without steady water. Photosynthesis has 3 inputs. Sunlight energy, CO2, and water. Easy to forget the water but that is the most variable and volatile.
Yeah stale data's a real problem for any dashboard we build too. We had a client's "live" churn number that was six weeks behind for a year before anyone flagged it. Nobody rechecks sources once a headline's out there.
Didn’t read, but let me guess. We’re gaining more trees in countries like China where large scale project to prevent desertification exist or in places like Russia or Canada where warming climate is opening more space where trees can grow. All the while tropical countries like Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia are losing tropical forest covers in ecological hotspots because of soybean or palm oil cultivation.
Tbh headlines like these do more damage to the climate change and ecological preservation conversation because they can be used to intentionally mislead what’s happening in the world.
>Tbh headlines like these do more damage to the climate change and ecological preservation conversation because they can be used to intentionally mislead what’s happening in the world.
The graphs show this pretty clearly.
But despite your misgivings the number of new trees growing 3 times faster than trees lost seems pretty good?
Like tropical countries have local issues for sure.
Honestly I prefer these bad headlines compared to "Lung of world gone we are dead in 15 minutes" sensationalism we usually get, and the data is good too.
Ran into this pulling satellite canopy data for a side project. NDVI trend maps show it clear as day, gains concentrated in China/India reforestation belts and boreal zones, losses concentrated in Amazon/Indonesia. Global Forest Watch's map layer makes it obvious in about 10 seconds.
Worth remembering this traces back to Song et al.'s 2018 Nature paper using Landsat time series — net gain, yes, but driven heavily by boreal regrowth and plantation expansion in places like China. Doesn't tell you much about biodiversity or primary forest loss in the tropics.
And this goes for any other ecosystem.
And the staggering statistic is that only 30% of the Earth is covered by forest now, a drop from 60% prior to humans going nuts.
Here's also an article that provides some counter arguments to the original paper: https://www.weforum.org/stories/nature-and-biodiversity/plan....