July 7, 2019

Russia is said to have the greatest potential to curb the global warming.  In Russia, the scholars have counted the largest areas of places for planting forests to absorb harmful emissions of carbon dioxide. The researchers identified the countries, which could make most contribution to fighting global warming owing to growing new forests. Beating the USA, Canada and China, Russia took the first place in terms of its forest potential.

According to many scientists, global warming is one of the most serious problems of mankind in the 21st century. Due to industrial development, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has rapidly increased, which has led to disruption of the energy balance of the planet. The atmosphere began to retain more heat, and for a very short time from the geological point of view, the average temperature has increased by one degree Celsius and it is continuing to rise.

Due to the global warming, the risk of catastrophic weather events and rise of the World Ocean level will increase, both due to temperature expansion of water and due to melting of glaciers. The storms, ever increasing in force, threaten to flood or erode coastal areas, the Russian permafrost areas are under risk of turning into swamps, and those areas in Africa and South East Asia that are already disadvantagedm may face crop failures due to droughts and destructive hurricanes/cyclones.

It should be said that the scientists, not to mention politicians and engineers, have no off-the-shelf solution to the problem. It is impossible to stop carbon dioxide emissions for good and immediately: the energy, and transport and agricultural sectors will have to re-constructed. Even if there is a political will (in a recent research - it was called a key factor in reduction of emissions), transition to new technologies will take several decades. Among other solutions to this problem are burying of carbon dioxide at the production facilities, and various global scale projects, from launching reflectors into space to aerosol spraying in the upper layers of the atmosphere or additional feeding of seaweeds in the World Ocean.

A group of Swiss scientists proposed another such solution in an article in Science journal.

Their article is about planning one of the simplest and safest geological-engineering measures - mass scale planting of trees and restoration of forests. Trees generally absorb carbon dioxide and convert it to biomass, which gets partially decomposed later, releasing carbon dioxide again and partly transferred to the soil and thereby removes excessive carbon from the atmosphere.

As opposed to the complex engineering structures, trees grow on their own, and no expensive, skilled professional maintenance is required for them, and, which is also important, it is for sure that forests on the planet will not cause any unexpected side effects. Russian scientists completed some research recently, which showed that trees continue absorbing carbon even after they have completed formation of any consecutive annual growth ring, so they, as a minimum, restrain the global warming.

The estimates of the authors of the new work showed that current climatic conditions of the Earth allow for covering about 4.4 billion hectares of land surface with treetops - the taiga, deciduous forests, and rain forests. But currently only 2.8 billion hectares of land is covered with forests. The rest of the land accounts for by both the areas occupied by humans and the plots that are only potentially suitable for new large-scale forestry. The researchers analysed the previously collected data on the earth surface use all over the world and concluded that 0.9 billion hectares of land are not occupied by cities, towns, villages, or agriculture. Therefore, theoretically it is possible to use this land for forests.

Having studied large volumes of satellite imagery (78774 photos in total of different parts of the planet), the authors initially compiled a world trees distribution map and defined the climatic zones with theoretical possibility of existence of forests. Then, from all these territories, they took out all areas, occupied by agriculture and towns, settlement and cities. For higher confidence level, the scholars used two independent datasets from two independent research groups. Their work resulted in compilation of two maps showing distribution of the areas, available for growing forests.

On one of the maps, the potential of India and both Americas is assessed more optimistically; generally, both maps turned out to be quite similar.

Provided that the humanity can plant and maintain these forests, then, the scientists are of the opinion, the forests will absorb about 200 billion tons of carbon from the 300 billion tons that mankind has managed to produce so far. Even in the conditions of continued emissions, this will have a very noticeable effect. According to the authors, growing forests will continue to the end of the century, because if the trees are planted today, it will be only in some decades, a stable ecosystem with constant absorption of carbon will be established.

According to the estimates of the scientists, Russia has the largest areas for potential forests- about 150 million hectares. And although the authors point out the impossibility of stating on the basis of the satellite imagery how the shown areas are suitable for this global forestry project, it is clear that Russia's potential is higher than that of the United States (103 million) and Canada (78 million hectares). Australia, China, Chile and Brazil are also in the list of possible leaders for foresting.

However, currently, the humankind in general, not only is not planting sufficient areas with forests, but they are reducing forest areas as well. In addition, global warming itself is changing the conditions for the trees to grow. If, with global warming, the area occupied by forests is more likely to increase in Siberia and in the north of Canada, then all tropical latitudes are more likely to face deforestation, and the final balance will be negative. According to the estimates of the researchers, by 2050, our world will have a risk of losing over 220 million (0.22 billion) hectares of forest. This is a significant proportion of those 0.9 billion hectares that could be planted with trees with due wish.

https://chrdk.ru/news/sazhay_lesa_spasay_planetu

https://www.nature.com/articles/nplants2015160

Translated into English by Muhiddin Ganiev