We have destroyed 4/5 of the world’s forests. That means only 1/5 remains. I think that even by our standards, thats bad. Luckily, a recent study by GPFLR (which includes the WWF, Britain’s Forestry Commission and International Union for Conservation of Nature) showed that an area bigger than Canada could be restored. They raised the previous estimates of how much forest could be restored from 850 million hectares to 1 billion hectares. That’s 6% of all the land on the world.
The thing is, like lots of aspects on the environment, we need to act now. And we aren’t. In fact, in the climate summit in Copenhagen in less than two weeks, many people are afraid forests are going to be on the bottom of a long list of climate change issues.
But according to research, restoring forests could remove 70 gigatonnnes of greenhouses gases. Thats 70,000,000,000,000 kilograms of greenhouse gases. The problem is, more forests are being lost than there are forests being restored; in the 5 years between 2000 and 2005, we lost 7 million hectares of forest.
Here’s the question: do you make one hectare of land as productive as possible, or do you need more land?