China’s emissions pledge joins bold efforts to halt climate change
- It seems likely we will need ‘out of the box’ aspiration if we are going to achieve the emission reductions that will keep our green planet from boiling over
- Regreening the planet will contribute significantly to efforts to contain climate change, and trees may well be humans’ best defence
The old proverb says the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now. With its “One Trillion Trees Initiative”, the World Economic Forum has taken that adage to heart.
A trillion is a very big number, and most of the local tree-planting forays I have seen in Hong Kong have involved 30 to 40 people and perhaps 500 to 1,000 saplings staked out on a Hong Kong mountainside. The leaps from 1,000 trees to 1 million to 1 billion and beyond seem preposterously ambitious.
I am reminded that the “Plant for the Planet” 1 billion trees initiative launched in 2007. Then environmentalist Jon Chambers at 8billiontrees.com set the bar even higher in 2018. Perhaps upping the ante to 1 trillion is not such an outrageous aim.
02:07
As China continues planting trees, 23% of the country is now covered in forest
Until a couple of years ago, it was generally agreed that the world was home to around 400 billion trees. In 2015, a team led by Thomas Crowther at Yale University used satellite mapping to estimate the world actually contained 3 trillion trees, with 55 per cent of them in Russia, Brazil, Canada, the United States and the Congo.
