‘Bad science’: Planting frenzy misses the grasslands for the trees

There’s a tree-planting frenzy everywhere you look. In August 2019, the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India announced that more than a million Indians had planted 220 million trees on a single day. A month earlier, Ethiopia had made a similar declaration: more than 350 million trees had been planted in one day.

“Always be suspicious of such big claims,” says William Bond, a grasslands researcher and emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. “It’s taken for granted that tree planting is good. But look at what they’re planting, where they’re planting.”

Intuitively, planting trees makes sense, especially given the high levels of forest loss and fires around the world. Even in 2020, when it was in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world lost 4.2 million hectares (10.4 million acres) of old-growth tropical forest in places such as the Brazilian Amazon – 12% higher compared to the previous year, according to data from the University of Maryland and Global Forest Watch. Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning and forest clearing are also at an all-time high. Where pre-industrial levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were about 278 parts per million (ppm), contemporary levels exceeded 420 ppm in April 2021, according to data from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai’i.

Reforestation after logging in western U.S. Image by Downtowngal via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Planting trees, then, can seem like the easiest way to battle both problems – it has the potential to create “forests” and soak up excess carbon dioxide from the air. This narrative is what many campaigns are relying upon. Take for example, the one-trillion trees initiative launched by the World Economic Forum in January 2020. The project notes that “trees and forests are a critical part of the solution to the climate crisis and biodiversity collapse. That’s why we aim to mobilise, connect and empower the global reforestation community to conserve, restore and grow one trillion trees by 2030.” The Bonn Challenge aims to bring 350 million hectares (865 million acres) of degraded and deforested land into restoration by 2030. An offshoot of the Bonn Challenge, AFR100 (the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative) wants to restore 100 million hectares (247 million acres) of land in Africa by 2030.

Restoring lands sounds like a good idea. But there is a widespread perception that “restoration” means “planting forests,” says Giselda Durigan, a forestry engineer and plant biologist at the São Paulo State Forest Institute in Brazil.

“I am primarily a forestry engineer, and that is why I take those concepts so seriously,” Durigan says. A good forest-restoration project, she says, must recreate a forest ecosystem where it was a forest before, a process also called reforestation. But afforestation, or planting a new forest in an area where there was no forest to begin with, can often be problematic.

This is because planting forests requires a lot of land. And areas that were never forests historically, but seem open and available for planting trees, are usually another critical ecosystem: grasslands, savannas, shrublands, meadows, rocky outcrops, or dry lands. For long, though, forests have been viewed as the default natural vegetation. And large tracts of non-forest areas, including shrublands, grasslands and savannas, continue to be viewed as unproductive, or historically forested land that humans have degraded to barrenness.

Where is all the unforested land?

In 2019, a paper titled ‘The global tree restoration potential’, published in the journal Science, created a furor. The authors of the study estimated, using remote sensing and machine learning, that Earth had available land for about 900 million hectares (2.2 billion acres) of forest restoration. Foresting this tree-less land would help store 205 gigatonnes of carbon, they wrote, making it “our most effective climate change solution to date.”

The study was, however, based on various flawed assumptions and data, several independent groups of researchers countered. Among the many problems, one group noted, was that the study had relied heavily on foresting grasslands and savannas.

A few years earlier, the World Resources Institute had published the Atlas of Forest Landscape Restoration Opportunities in collaboration with the IUCN. This influential map identified more than 2 billion hectares (5 billion acres) of land as presenting an opportunity for forest restoration. But subsequent analysis by independent researchers including Durigan showed that the Atlas ­had classified 900 million hectares of grassy biomes as “deforested” or “degraded.”

“They mapped the major game parks of Africa as degraded and deforested, defining degradation as anything that damages trees,” Bond says.

The Cuyaba dwarf frog (Eupemphix nattereri) is only found in Brazil’s Cerrado. It has a unique defense mechanism: mooning potential predators in the hopes of scaring them away with its giant rump eye spots. Image by Felipe Gomez via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).

Authors of both maps countered by saying that their maps simply point out areas that can be potentially forested. Each area, however, needed to be assessed individually.

But critics say that by marking broad areas as potential sites for restoration – a term usually conflated with planting forests – the maps prompted a flurry of massive tree-planting campaigns and projects around the world. AFR100, for instance, is aiming to plant trees across 100 million hectares of mostly savanna in Africa by 2030, write Bond and his colleagues in a 2019 paper published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

“These maps have been extremely damaging,” Bond says. “It was really superficial, bad science, but then international policies are feeding into this. The vast areas then became the targets for reforestation, supported by the World Bank, the IUCN, the German government and so on.”

At the heart of many of the disagreements lie muddled-up ideas. When is an area a “forest”? What is a “degraded” forest? How is it different from a grassland or savanna with trees? How far back in time do you go to see what the original habitat of the area was like? Does a forest always trump a non-forested area?

Degraded or naturally unforested?

The WRI Atlas considered all areas with more than 10% tree cover as a form of forest; this is the broad definition also used by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Only land with less tree cover was considered to be either naturally non-forested or converted to some other land use.

Now, deforestation and degradation of forests can create open areas with few trees. But non-forested areas like grasslands and savannas, too, naturally have trees. Sometimes the trees are scattered, sometimes they occur in dense lots. This means that when viewed from above, many of these areas will have more than 10% tree cover and look like degraded forests.

“You’ve got to be careful of the word forest and what it means – the definition of forest is critical,” Bond says. “The definition provided in global terms by the FAO is more than 10% tree cover, which includes nearly all the world’s savannas, which are not forests at all.”

If you’re thinking just in terms of tree cover in an area, it can be hard to distinguish between a “degraded forest” and a naturally non-forested area. But there are better ways to do so. Let’s consider tropical savannas. In a paper entitled ‘When is a ‘forest’ a savanna, and why does it matter?’ published in Global Ecology and Biogeography in 2011, Jayashree Ratnam, an ecologist at National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, India, and her colleagues recommend looking carefully at the kinds of plants growing on the land, and the kinds of evolutionary adaptations they show.

Tropical savannas, such as the Serengeti in Tanzania, the Cerrado in Brazil or the grasslands of central India, they write, are dominated by species of grasses that use a form of photosynthesis called C4. These grasses don’t like shade, which means that the trees that grow in these landscapes are typically short and have smaller leaf areas and open crowns that let sunlight filter to the ground. By contrast, a tropical forest tends to have grasses that use more shade-tolerant C3 photosynthesis because trees there grow tall and wide and have denser canopies.

This may look like a meadow of small groundcover plants (A), but it’s actually the canopy of a Jacaranda decurrens tree in Brazil’s Cerrado. In addition to leaves, the tree also flowers aboveground (B). Like conventional trees, the underground branches of J. decurrens are woody (C). Photo courtesy of Alves et al., 2013.

The C4 grasses in savannas are highly flammable. The wet season prods the grasses to grow long and thick, while the prolonged dry seasons turn them into potent fuel for fire. Savanna fires, however, tend to be low on the ground, burning the grasses and young saplings, but not big or hot enough to scorch adult trees. Once the fires ebb, the grasses regenerate quickly. It’s perhaps counterintuitive, but many savannas need fires to remain savannas. Even the trees that grow in these areas have adaptations like thick bark to live with fire.

Fires in forests, on the other hand, tend to be very hot, burning not just the understory but the crowns of tall, adult trees as well. They spread rapidly to other trees, and can turn catastrophic. In fact, Ratnam and colleagues note that many areas in South Asia, currently classified as tropical dry forests, such as Bandipur Tiger Reserve in southern India, have such C4-dominated grasses with interspersed fire-resistant tree species. These areas are more like savannas than forests. “Having worked for a while in African savannas and being very familiar with the idea that mixed tree-grass ecosystems were distinctive from forests, when we returned to India and started visiting various field sites, we were struck by the similarities of these sites with African savannas,” Ratnam told Mongabay India in 2019.

Apart from needing fire and light, savannas also have a long association with animals that graze, studies have found. They’ve evolved to support both large, wild herbivores like wildebeest, rhinoceros, zebras and antelopes, as well as nomadic pastoralists whose livestock feed on the grasses and small plants and keep the savanna ecosystem an open one.

Still, for many, the image of a fire, or of a goat pulling out young saplings, might seem like a “disturbance” that humans have introduced to forests, resulting in forest degradation. Moreover, tropical savannas and forests can often occur side by side, within the same wet and warm climatic conditions. That raises the question: did savannas exist before humans started cutting down forests, or did humans degrade forests into savannas?

Current evidence suggests that many of the world’s tropical savannas are ancient. In Africa, for example, studies have found that savannas started spreading 10 million to 15 million years ago and were extensive by around 3 million years ago – long before humans started clearing large tracts of forests. Even in Asia, evidence suggests that these habitats existed before human arrival.

If you had to look at more recent history, a study from South Africa found that there were around 471,100 hectares (1.16 million acres) of “forests” in the country in 1750; the authors consider this to be a baseline, before humans started widespread conversion of land for other uses. Yet, AFR100 has a reforestation target of 3.6 million hectares (8.9 million acres) in the country. “So the target has got nothing to do with restoring forest. It was an arbitrary number, it was pulled out of a hat. It had no relationship to the real need to reforest areas that had been deforested,” Bond says.

AFR100 did not respond to a request for comment, but on its website describes forest landscape restoration as “more than just planting trees” and mentions including savannah restoration as part of its commitment.

Collateral damage

Much of the recent emphasis on planting trees comes from international agencies and individuals from the Global North, and is based on the assumption that tree-less areas store very little carbon. Forests, on the other hand, are considered miracle carbon sequesterers.

Forests are great at storing carbon; there’s little controversy there. In fact, the loss of tropical forests contributes some 5 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, which means that halting deforestation and reducing fossil fuel emissions are two powerful actions to take, if tackling the climate crisis is the goal. But Durigan says that tree-planting programs often “create the illusion that if we can plant trees in the whole world, we’ll neutralise all carbon emissions.”

For the goal of storing carbon, planting forests on grasslands or shrublands, however, can backfire.

In general, forests store most of their carbon in woody trunks and leaves aboveground. But much of the carbon in grasslands is in the soil (in extensive root systems of the grasses as well as decaying organic matter). In fact, grasslands, covering a quarter of the Earth’s surface, can store up to 30% of the world’s carbon, per some estimates. “Replacing savannas, grasslands and wetlands by tree plantation[s] is expected to decrease carbon storage in the soil, despite increasing aerial biomass,” Durigan says.

There is also the question of fire. Afforestation projects in grasslands or savannas have rarely planted “forests” of native tree species, and typically involved establishing monoculture plantations of fast-growing exotic species like eucalyptus or pine. These trees burn very well, and in case of fires, can turn devastating.

“Since fire is a natural factor in savannas, it will happen in the dry season despite human efforts to avoid,” Durigan says. In open savanna systems, such fires usually cause low carbon emissions and this carbon is quickly captured back when the grasses and plants regenerate after the fire, she adds. But “firestorms in forest plantations will irreversibly send huge amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”

Tree-planting programs and governments say they’re paying attention to the kinds of species they grow. But it isn’t hard to imagine that plantations of eucalyptus and pine trees will still be common, especially with the kinds of targets they want to achieve in a short period of time. “Planting indigenous trees is slow and difficult,” Bond says. “We often don’t know how to get them to grow, and you can’t plant them over a million hectares. It’s difficult.”

On the other hand, growing large populations of pines and eucalyptus is easy; people have been doing it for a long time, Bond adds. Madagascar’s latest mass tree-planting drive, for example, includes exotic species like eucalyptus and acacia along with some fruit trees. But with a warming climate making droughts and heat waves worse, establishing plantations on vast tracts of grasslands could put the very forests you’re trying to protect at risk.

“Unbelievably, people are planting eucalyptus in Madagascar, next to the last remnants of their forests, and they’re bringing fire right into those forests,” Bond says. “It just indicates such ignorance. When the fires do happen, which they will happen undoubtedly, they’re increasing the risk to the forest massively.”

Impacts of tree planting on climate change are complicated by other factors like albedo, the amount of sunlight that’s reflected back into space without being absorbed as heat by the Earth’s surface. Since land surface covered by forests is much darker than if covered by grasses or even crops, afforestation can lead to a decrease in albedo, Durigan says, which can lead to an increase, instead of the desired decrease, in air temperature.

Afforestation of grasslands, shrublands, or even native forests with plantations, a widespread practice for timber, are also known to create water woes. Several studies have found that, in general, such plantations consume more water than the original vegetation, which, in turn, reduces flow of rivers downstream. Long-term experiments have found this to be the case in South Africa, for example, which has extensive areas, including montane grasslands and shrublands, under eucalyptus plantations. Based on these results, the country formulated legislation to restrict afforestation with plantations.

Then there are the more obvious impacts of converting open, airy grasslands, savannas and shrublands into plantation forests: the loss of unique biodiversity. Losing savanna grasslands can mean losing animals like wildebeest, giraffes, rhinos, lions, blackbucks and the great Indian bustard.

So, planting thousands of seedlings in naturally open areas can, in fact, be disastrous if done too quickly without adequate evaluation. But there is value in planting trees in non-forested areas like agricultural lands, or in helping native trees in degraded grasslands and arid areas regenerate.

Restoring degraded habitats

Let’s consider Regreening Africa, a program that aims to “reverse land degradation on 1 million hectares [2.5 million acres] across 8 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.” Since the demand for agricultural land is a major driver of deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa, the program focuses on restoring degraded lands in agricultural farms and community lands by integrating trees into the landscape. Not just any trees, but trees that the communities want.

“Rule number one is let natural regeneration occur, especially in areas where you don’t have a lot of human pressure,” says Susan Chomba, a social scientist and program manager of Regreening Africa. “It’s going to encourage not just the tree species themselves, but other kinds of biodiversity that naturally exists in that area. It’s less expensive, and it’s the most kind of effective way of letting nature heal itself.”

But where there is human pressure and natural regeneration might not work well, the program asks a fundamental question: what is it that needs to be restored?

The answer isn’t based on scientific measurements alone, but also on what farmers and pastoralists in the area want. 

Do they want more fruit trees to earn more income? Do they want more water in the area? Do they want the soil on their lands to be more productive, and wash away less frequently when it rains? “If fruit trees is the end goal, we need to understand what kind of diversity of food resources are suitable for that area and are needed by farmers,” Chomba says. “If farmers want water, we try to figure out what kind of tree species native to these ecosystems can help restore hydrological functions.”

Shola grassland in India’s Kudremukh National Park. Image by Kousik Nandy via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

It’s not been easy, Chomba says, because governments and various NGOs still tend to hand over hundreds of eucalyptus saplings to farmers to grow on their lands. Farmers, too, accept these species as the default trees to plant. This was the case in Rwanda, the team found.

“We engaged with the local district and subdistrict government, and we found that most of the seedlings being prepared by the cooperatives were eucalyptus,” Chomba says. “When we discussed this, they said, ‘Oh, but if you grow other kinds of seedlings the farmers are not going to be interested. These are the ones that farmers are interested in’.”

But when the team started holding discussions with the farmers themselves, with the government officials present, the narrative shifted. “We asked them, ‘Could you please tell us historically what kind of tree species existed in these ecosystems?’ And my goodness, they were naming hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of tree species and their functions.”

The farmers named species that were extremely important to them for their medicinal value. Some species gave them important food, fruits and nuts. Then there were tree species, whose presence indicated there was water around. When the team asked them if they would like to see these species come back in their areas, there was a resounding “yes.” Eucalyptus was good for timber and firewood, they said, but they would like to see the other ecosystem services, like more water, return to their lands. Chomba’s team then worked with the government, cooperatives and farmers to revive some of the native species.

“In some areas in Rwanda now, farmers really demand these indigenous tree species,” Chomba says. “We saw a big transformation there, not because of something that was completely out of big scientific innovation, but by engaging with the local knowledge in communities to look back at what used to exist in their landscape and what they’d like to see.”

Such engagement is uncommon, though. In India, for example, the law requires “compensatory afforestation” whenever infrastructure or mining projects involve cutting down forest areas; the forest loss has to be “compensated” for by either establishing a plantation over an equivalent area or by depositing money with the forest department to do so. In a country where land is an incredibly valuable resource, marginal communities often end up losing their lands for these “compensatory forests,” usually without their knowledge or any form of consultation on what the communities might want.

Even if the local communities are consulted, whether they will support those trees’ growth for years to come and care for them depends on whether they see more value in the trees remaining standing, or in cutting them down or not tending to them. Land tenure, where the farmers have an ownership in the trees and land, can provide that value, examples from Africa have shown. “Everybody now knows that land tenure is a big problem,” Chomba says. “People also know the solution, but they don’t want to get into that because it means you have to engage with the local authorities for a long period of time in trying to change the laws. It’s not as simple as planting a tree and saying I planted a million trees. So we need to be able to understand the policy bottlenecks and be prepared to do the hard work to change them.”

Overall, agroforestry, if done well and keeping in mind the local context, can achieve lots: it can increase the productivity of soil, improve microclimate as well as water and food security, and build resilience to climate change. 

But whether these benefits actually materialise needs to be monitored systematically, Chomba adds.

Durigan says planting trees in farmlands is a good way to restore degraded lands. But she doesn’t consider agroforestry to be true reforestation or afforestation.

“I do like productive systems with trees spaced, especially in degraded land, no matter if it was not a forest before. It is better than monocultures,” she says. “But agroforestry does not result in a true forest. It is not afforestation nor reforestation, since both are expected to create a continuous canopy and a forest structure. Agroforestry is a productive system where trees and crops share the space, aiming at improving degraded soils or to have an ecologically ‘healthier’ land use.”

Not everyone loves a forest

Forests are culturally important for many people around the world. Dense, mysterious forests have been a part of stories, nursery rhymes, poems and movies. But those who live in areas that have naturally been non-forested – grasslands in India, rolling meadows in Scotland, Cerrado in Brazil – don’t necessarily want them.

The loss of open areas to forests or plantations can mean losing an entirely unique landscape.

“We cannot see the horizon anymore,” Durigan says. “We cannot see the blue sky, the rain falling, the mountains and the valleys, we cannot feel the breeze on our faces. Unfortunately, this ecosystem service is not perceived by the urban society.”

The Shola grasslands atop the mountains of the Western Ghats in India, home to the pastoral Toda community, for instance, now have extensive stands of invasive acacia trees that have spread from plantations that were originally established by the British who settled there. With the trees proliferating, the community’s traditional cattle rearing has become difficult. Unlike the grasslands that made spotting predators easier, the trees now provide cover for carnivores, increasing human-animal conflict. There’s been loss of grasses that the community used in their daily lives; wetlands have disappeared; tribe members are increasingly forced to migrate to other places for work.

Bond says he loves trees, but he doesn’t want them everywhere. “My garden is full of trees; I love them,” he says. 

“But a forest is a dank dark place. Here in my part of the world, we love the open spaces too. We love grass. This is my mantra: ‘the right tree / in the right place / for the right reasons’.”

Citations:

Bastin, J., Finegold, Y., Garcia, C., Mollicone, D., Rezende, M., Routh, D., … Crowther, T. W. (2019). The global tree restoration potential. Science, 365(6448), 76-79. doi:10.1126/science.aax0848

Veldman, J. W., Aleman, J. C., Alvarado, S. T., Anderson, T. M., Archibald, S., Bond, W. J., … Zaloumis, N. P. (2019). Comment on “The global tree restoration potential”. Science, 366(6463), eaay7976. doi:10.1126/science.aay7976

Veldman, J. W., Overbeck, G. E., Negreiros, D., Mahy, G., Le Stradic, S., Fernandes, G. W., … Bond, W. J. (2015). Where tree planting and forest expansion are bad for biodiversity and ecosystem services. BioScience, 65(10), 1011-1018. doi:10.1093/biosci/biv118

Bond, W. J., Stevens, N., Midgley, G. F., & Lehmann, C. E. R. (2019). The trouble with trees: Afforestation plans for Africa. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 34(11), 963-965. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2019.08.003

Ratnam, J., Bond, W. J., Fensham, R. J., Hoffmann, W. A., Archibald, S., Lehmann, C. E., … Sankaran, M. (2011). When is a ‘forest’ a savanna, and why does it matter? Global Ecology and Biogeography, 20(5), 653-660. doi:10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00634.x

Veldman, J. W. (2016). Clarifying the confusion: Old-growth savannahs and tropical ecosystem degradation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1703), 20150306. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0306

Bond, W. J., & Zaloumis, N. P. (2016). The deforestation story: Testing for anthropogenic origins of Africa’s flammable grassy biomes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1696), 20150170. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0170

Kumar, D., Pfeiffer, M., Gaillard, C., Langan, L., Martens, C., & Scheiter, S. (2020). Misinterpretation of Asian savannas as degraded forest can mislead management and conservation policy under climate change. Biological Conservation, 241, 108293. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108293

Skowno, A. L., Jewitt, D., & Slingsby, J. A. (2021). Rates and patterns of habitat loss across authors: South Africa’s vegetation biomes. South African Journal of Science, 117(1/2). doi:10.17159/sajs.2021/8182

Albaugh, J. M., Dye, P. J., & King, J. S. (2013). Eucalyptus and water use in South Africa. International Journal of Forestry Research, 2013. doi:10.1155/2013/852540

Chomba, S., Sinclair, F., Savadogo, P., Bourne, M., & Lohbeck, M. (2020). Opportunities and constraints for using farmer managed natural regeneration for land restoration in sub-Saharan Africa. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 3. doi:10.3389/ffgc.2020.571679

(Source: Mongabay)

Forests the size of France have regenerated over past 20 years

 Study highlights forests’ capacity to regenerate themselves and will guide reforestation projects to help tackle climate crisis, researchers say

Over the past two decades, 59 million hectares of forest – an area equivalent to the size of France – have regenerated around the world with minimal human intervention, a new study shows.

Major hotspots where woodlands have recovered include parts of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, areas of northern Canada, central Africa and the boreal forests in Mongolia’s northern wilderness.

This area of forest has the potential to store the equivalent of 5.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide – more than the annual emissions of the US.

The authors said forest regeneration is where “nature takes the lead”. Some areas require no human activity to help them regenerate, while others require invasive species or farm animals to be removed or fenced out of the area.

The research, which was based on satellite imaging and ground surveys, comes amid a growing awareness of the importance of tree cover in efforts to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

The analysis was carried out by Trillion Trees, a joint venture between BirdLife International, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the WWF, which is aiming to “urgently speed up and scale up” forest regeneration, and is aiming to protect and restore one trillion trees by 2050.

An area roughly the size of the Netherlands has regrown in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest since 2000 (Getty)

As well as specific regeneration areas, the study’s authors said other reasons for forest expansion included more responsible industry practices and factors such as human migration towards cities.

The WWF’s William Baldwin-Cantello said allowing woodlands to naturally regenerate is often more effective than human efforts to bring back trees.

He said: “The science is clear: if we are to avoid dangerous climate change and turn around the loss of nature, we must both halt deforestation and restore natural forests.

“We’ve known for a long time that natural forest regeneration is often cheaper, richer in carbon and better for biodiversity than actively planted forests, and this research tells us where and why regeneration is happening, and how we can recreate those conditions elsewhere.”

But he warned that despite the good news the study highlighted, the rate of deforestation is still far outpacing that of regrowth, and called on the government to take action on supply lines which result in deforestation around the world.

He said: “We can’t take this regeneration for granted – deforestation still claims millions of hectares every year, vastly more than is regenerated.

“To realise the potential of forests as a climate solution, we need support for regeneration in climate delivery plans and must tackle the drivers of deforestation, which in the UK means strong domestic laws to prevent our food causing deforestation overseas.”

The researchers highlighted the Atlantic Forest in Brazil as one particular area which was seeing considerable regeneration. An estimated 4.2 million hectares – an area roughly the size of the Netherlands – has regrown since 2000.

In the boreal forests of Mongolia’s northern wilderness, the study suggests around 1.2 million hectares of forest have regenerated in the last 20 years. The study said this progress was partly due to the work of the WWF, as well as increased emphasis from the Mongolian government on protected areas.

The WWF warned that despite apparent momentum behind woodland restoration, in many cases, government plans “involve very limited expansion of natural forests, despite the strong climate and biodiversity benefits they offer”.

The authors of the study warn that encouraging signs of regeneration cannot be taken for granted. Forests across Brazil face significant threats today, even the Atlantic Forests – a recognised success story in restoration. Such is the extent of historic deforestation that the area of this unique forest still needs to more than double from currently 12 per cent of its original area to 30 per cent, in order to reach what scientists believe is a minimal threshold for its lasting conservation.

Naikoa Aguilar-Amuchastegui, senior director of forest carbon science at WWF, and who led the data analysis team said: “Even though this is an exploratory effort, it still highlights the potential that enabling and consolidating regeneration has for mitigating climate change and securing its biodiversity benefits. However, this remains difficult to map and a lot of additional work lies ahead.”

Trillion Trees said it is now planning to invite local groups and green funding organisations to work on new landscape restoration ventures, focusing on areas offering the maximum benefit for vulnerable ecosystems and local communities.

(Source: The Independent)

Coronavirus: US suspends travel from Brazil for foreigners

The US has imposed travel restrictions on foreign nationals who have been to Brazil in the last 14 days.

The South American nation recently became the world's second major hotspot for coronavirus cases.

Brazil has recorded more than 360,000 cases, the country's health ministry announced on Sunday, while over 22,000 people have died with the virus.

A White House spokeswoman said the restrictions would help ensure new cases are not brought into the US.

Brazil is the country with the second highest number of cases. AFP

"Today's action will help ensure foreign nationals who have been in Brazil do not become a source of additional infections in our country," White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement.

Non-Americans who have been in Brazil in the two weeks before they request entry to the US will be denied that entry. The restriction will not affect trade between the two countries.

The suspension is to take effect on 28 May at 23:59 EDT (03:59 GMT).

The travel ban will not apply to US citizens, or to the spouse, parent, legal guardian, or child of a US citizen or lawful permanent resident, and most siblings under the age of 21.

"The potential for undetected transmission of the virus by infected individuals seeking to enter the United States from [Brazil] threatens the security of our transportation system and infrastructure and the national security," said the suspension order published by the White House on Sunday.

Earlier on Sunday, White House National security adviser Robert O'Brien told CBS "Face the Nation" that travel restriction for Brazil were expected shortly.

"We hope that'll be temporary, but because of the situation in Brazil, we're going to take every step necessary to protect the American people," Mr O'Brien said.

He added that "we'll take a look at the other countries on a country-by-country basis for sure".

US President Donald Trump suggested earlier this week that he was considering imposing a ban on travel from Brazil.

The US currently leads the world in coronavirus cases. It has over 1.6 million known cases and is nearing 100,000 deaths linked to the virus.

Sunday's announcement is the latest travel restriction imposed by the US in a bid to combat the spread of the virus.

Foreign nationals who have recently visited China, Iran, the European Schengen area, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland are already barred from entry to the US.

Canada and the US also recently agreed to extend the closure of their shared border to non-essential travel.

What is the situation across Brazil?

Brazil recently overtook Russia with regards to known cases of the virus. President Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly dismissed the risks posed by the virus.

President Bolsonaro hugged a young child while meeting supporters on Sunday. EPA

The number of deaths in Brazil has been doubling roughly every two weeks, compared to about every two months in the UK, four months in France, and five months in Italy.

Experts have warned that the real figure may be far higher due to a lack of testing.

Analysis by Katy Watson, South American corespondent

The rising death toll and infections in Brazil are clearly worrying the rest of the world, but President Jair Bolsonaro shows no signs of treating it seriously. On Sunday, he was out once again, mingling with hundreds of supporters in Brasilia - and once again he was not wearing a mask.

President Bolsonaro seems more caught up in fighting political battles - he's facing accusations of political interference to protect his family - than looking at how to rein in the country's spiralling health crisis. These past few days have revealed some ugly truths here. Not only has Brazil become one of the epicentres of the coronavirus crisis, but it's clear that the president and his team are unable - or even willing - to lead the country out of it.

There's no doubt this decision by President Trump, a man whom President Bolsonaro has always openly admired, will sting - but the question is, will it do anything to change the Brazilian leader's approach?

(Source: BBC)

Amazon deforestation could trigger new pandemics, experts warn amid fears over Brazilian land ownership law

‘We run the risk of a serious environmental reverse during this crisis’, former environment agency chief warns

The Brazilian government is seeking to use coronavirus as cover to usher in laws which could lead to increased occupation of indigenous lands and deforestation in the Amazon, campaigners and experts allege, amid warnings that further environmental disruption may lead to new pandemics.

The country has been divided on the severity of Covid-19, with president Jair Bolsonaro dismissing it as “a little flu” and opposing lockdown measures, for which public support is waning, despite mass graves being dug in Sao Paulo in the face of rising fatalities.

While the crisis has seen most industries grind to a standstill, government data suggests deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rose 30 per cent in March compared to the same period last year, with the most recent data suggesting the trend has continued in April.

There has also been a reported increase in forays into some indigenous lands by miners and land-grabbers, as both civil and official protection efforts are scaled back for fear of infection.

Against this backdrop, scientists are issuing renewed warnings that ecological disruption can increase the chance of novel infections crossing over to humans – known as “zoonotic” diseases.

“Approximately one in three outbreaks of new and emerging illnesses is linked to changes in land use, like deforestation,” Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, told Mongabay.

Dr Daszak was lead author in a vast US government-backed study published in 2019 which noted that HIV, Ebola and Zika virus are all “diseases causally linked to land change use”.

Some experts suggest the Amazon is a particularly high-risk location for novel outbreaks.

“Where you have a huge biodiverse zone, the Amazon, and then you have an encroaching human footprint, through urbanisation, road networks, deforestation, extractive industries like logging and mining, you have all of the ingredients for a virus spillover recipe,” David Wolking, of the University of California’s One Health Institute told Greenpeace’s investigative arm, Unearthed.

Wildfires, often caused by slash-and-burn deforestation tactics, can also play a role in the emergence of new diseases.

Notably, some researchers now credit the huge fires in Indonesia in 1998 with the arrival of Nipah virus – with vast smoke clouds forcing fruit bats to search elsewhere for food, settling on trees in Malaysian orchards. Pigs eating the same fruit soon fell ill, with farmers following suit shortly afterwards.

With the Amazon suffering its worst fire season in a decade in 2019, more than a dozen international experts convened to offer a stark warning.

“The Amazon region of Brazil, endemic for many communicable or zoonotic diseases can, after a wildfire, trigger a selection for survival, and with it change the habitat and behaviours of some animal species,” they wrote. ”These can be reservoirs of zoonotic bacteria, viruses, and parasites.”

Amid these warnings, Brazilian congress could soon hold a digital-only vote – using emergency processes introduced to allow more rapid decision-making during the Covid-19 crisis – on enshrining temporary legislation into permanent law, which campaigners warn would legitimise historic land-grabs and facilitate new invasions, paving the way for further deforestation.

As a result, the 120-day Provisional Measure (MP) 910, decreed by Mr Bolsonaro in December, may now be passed as a permanent measure within the next three weeks without being subjected to typical levels of debate and scrutiny, environmentalists allege.

The Bolsonaro administration has said the new land ownership rules will grant legal titles to farmers who have occupied federal lands in a “tame and peaceful way for many years”, enabling them to “rise above subsistence farming and improve their income”.

It insists the new law in “no way” facilitates land-grabbing or deforestation, arguing that new landowners will be held strictly accountable for the preservation of up to 80 per cent of their land.

But analysts warn that the new legislation allows huge swathes of land illegally cut down and occupied before 2018 – often by criminal gangs – to be legally seized by land-grabbers using evidence of their illegal activities as proof of their occupation.

Meanwhile, a new rule called IN 09, passed last week by the government’s indigenous agency Funai, strips yet-to-be-demarcated but indigenous lands of their designation as “indigenous” in the land registry, according to Greenpeace.

Roughly a third of all indigenous land is not yet demarcated, the group says. In 2019, the BBC reported that more than 800,000 indigenous people lived in 450 demarcated indigenous territories, which accounted for 12 per cent of the country’s total land area.

These new changes will allow people occupying indigenous land – usually for the purpose of deforestation and agriculture or mining – to obtain a certificate that the land is undemarcated.

Under the proposed new law, MP 910, this certificate could then be used in support of a land-grabber’s claim to legalise property on that land, and eventually purchase for a fraction of the value without bidding against other parties.

The former head of the country’s environment agency has also warned that sections of the proposed law which supposedly benefit small farmers – by scrapping the need for official inspections of land under 2,500 hectares ahead of a potential acquisition – could be exploited as loopholes by large-scale land-grabbers.

The government says it will stop proxy ownership by larger parties – who it is feared could use small landowners to acquire it for them without official assessment - by banning the sale of newly acquired land for the first 10 years.

“With this flexibility, and without separating big landowners from small ones, this law legalises those who live from land invasion, deforestation and the sale of public land,” Suely Araujo, former president of Ibama, told Mongabay.

She added: “If there isn’t a political decision to withdraw MP 910 from the measures to be voted through, we run the risk of a serious environmental reverse during this [health] crisis.”

The 2018 cut-off date would be the second extension of an initial 2004 cut-off, which campaigners fear would embolden land-grabbers with the promise of continually renewed amnesty for past crimes.

As a result, the new law could lead to the deforestation of an additional 1.6 million hectares – an area larger than Yemen – by 2027, conservation research organisation Imazon estimates.

“If passed, it would be a hard blow against any hope that there will be any regaining control and fighting deforestation,” Brenda Brito, a lawyer and researcher at Imazon, told Unearthed.

“It will, in fact, be the end of that hope, if anyone is still hopeful that the current government will actually face and fight deforestation. Because this measure will end up stimulating even more than is happening now.”

(Source: Independent)

'It's positively alpine!': Disbelief in big cities as air pollution falls

Delhi is one of many capitals enjoying improved air quality since restrictions were introduced due to the coronavirus

The screenshots began to circulate on Delhi WhatsApp groups last week, captioned with varying expressions of disbelief. Having checked the air quality index, something of a sadistic morning ritual among residents of India’s capital, most could not believe their eyes.

Gone was the familiar menacing red banner, indicating how each intake of breath is really just a toxic blast on the lungs, replaced instead by a healthy, cheerful green. Could it really be that Delhi’s pollution levels now fell into the category of … “good”? “It’s positively alpine!” exclaimed one message.

A nationwide lockdown imposed across India almost two weeks ago to stop the spread of the coronavirus – the largest lockdown of its kind attempted anywhere – has led to widespread chaos and suffering, especially among the country’s 300 million poor. Yet in Delhi, the world’s most polluted city, it has also resulted in some of the freshest air the capital has seen in decades.

New Delihi’s India Gate war memorial on 17 October 2019 and on 8 April 2020. 

Photograph: Anushree Fadnavis/Adnan Abidi/Reuters

It is a lockdown silver lining being repeated across the world, as toxic megacities such as Bangkok, Beijing, São Paulo and Bogotá, where varying coronavirus restrictions have been imposed, all reported an unprecedented decline in pollution. Yet it is countered with one cruel irony: with most residents of these cities strictly confined to their homes, few have any way to appreciate this newly fresh air, except through an open window or a during speedy trip to the supermarket.

In Delhi, air quality index (AQI) levels are usually a severe 200 on a good day (anything above 25 is deemed unsafe by World Health Organization). During peak pollution periods last year they soared well into a life-threatening 900 and sometimes off the measurable scale. But as Delhi’s 11m registered cars were taken off the roads and factories and construction were ground to a halt, AQI levels have regularly fallen below 20. The skies are suddenly a rare, piercing blue. Even the birdsong seems louder.

Dr Shashi Tharoor, a politician and author who has been vocal on environmental issues, said he hoped that it was a wake-up call. “The blissful sight of blue skies and the joy of breathing clean air provides just the contrast to illustrate what we are doing to ourselves the rest of the time,” said Tharoor. “Today the typical Delhi AQI hovers around 30 and one blissful afternoon, after a spurt of rain, it dropped to 7.”

“Seven,” Tharoor exclaimed again in disbelief. “In Delhi! Pure joy!”.

Tharoor’s sister Smita, who was visiting from the UK when the lockdown was imposed and found herself stuck in Delhi, was equally effusive. As someone with asthma, she said the city’s air, normally thick with pollution, was usually a health nightmare. But now: “The air is clear, the skies are blue. I see the evening stars with clarity and hear the chirruping of excited birds at this unexpected bonus they have received.”

While India’s powerful car lobby has long disputed that cars are a major cause of Delhi’s pollution, Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment, said the lockdown and resulting rapid drop in pollution showed once and for all just what a polluting role vehicles had in the city.

Narain also stressed that while she wished Delhi was like this “all the time”, adding: “I don’t want people to say ‘Oh, environmentalists are celebrating this lockdown:’ we are not. This is not the solution. But whatever the new normal is post-Covid-19, we have to make sure we take this breath of fresh air and think about the serious efforts we need to deal with pollution in Delhi.”

It is not just Delhi experiencing the clearest skies in years. As pollution dropped to its lowest level in three decades this week this week, residents of Jalandhar in Punjab woke up to an incredible sight in the distance: the Dhauladhar mountain range in Himachal Pradesh. The peaks, which are over 120 miles away, had not been sighted on the Punjab horizon for almost 30 years.

It is the absence of cars on some of the world’s most congested roads that seems to be making the most crucial differences. Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, which only last month had closed schools because the pollution got so bad, has experienced a similar transformation in the air since partial lockdown, mainly due to the fall in road traffic. “We can see quite a big gap between the air quality standard that we have [compared with this time last year],” says Tara Buakamsri, Thailand director for Greenpeace.

But residents of Bangkok lamented how the places to enjoy the fresh air were swiftly disappearing. Playgrounds, sporting grounds and even parks, a rare source of solace in the bustling, intensely urban environs of Bangkok, have all now been shut. “I feel sad for the old people who use the park to hang out and meet friends. I think they will be so sad at home,” said Nantawan Wangudomsuk, 31, a producer who used to run in the parks.

Across South America’s most populous city of São Paulo, ground zero of Brazil’s brewing coronavirus crisis, notorious traffic queues and smoggy horizons are also giving way to calm streets and clearer skies.

An aerial view of empty street on the first day of lockdown in São Paulo, Brazil. Photograph: Reuters

During weekday rush-hour, downtown São Paulo’s João Goulart elevated highway – nicknamed Minhocão, the Big Worm – normally heaves with traffic as thousands of cars cram four narrow lanes and beeping motorbikes weave through daringly small spaces. But with the city’s coronavirus lockdown, Minhocão now resembles a small-town avenue instead of a major road in a metropolis of 12 million people.

“The air is certainly better,” said Daniel Guth, an urban mobility consultant. “I’ve felt the improvement in air quality both as a cyclist and as a quarantined citizen,” he laughed. “We should use this as a moment to reflect on what transport methods we should prioritise when this crisis is over.”

Despite being under lockdown, many Paulistas, as the city’s residents are known, are still finding ways to enjoy the cleaner air, taking to windows and apartment balconies for nightly pot-banging protests against Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly dismissed the coronavirus as just “a little flu”.

Empty roads in Bogota on 21 March, after the quarantine was imposed on the city. 

Photograph: Raúl Arboleda/AFP via Getty

Bogotá, the sprawling mountaintop capital of Colombia, is also usually choking with traffic so bad that officials occasionally ban cars for entire days. But since the nationwide coronavirus quarantine took hold on 24 March, exhaust fumes have fallen as the city ground to a halt. Yet the newly fresh air has been taunting Bogotá’s residents, who are allowed to leave home only for food and medicines, not even a daily dose of outdoor exercise. “Without a doubt, this pandemic is helping us improve air quality,” said Carolina Urrutia, Bogotá’s district environment secretary. “With the city shut down, we are able to focus our efforts on other environmental factors.”

Cali, Colombia’s third city and usually a smokey, congested metropolis, has also been spared from the usual forest fires, allowing residents to breathe fresher air. “The thick cloud that usually hangs over us has been lifted,” said Christian Camilo Villa, an air quality activist and Cali resident. “The concern is that it will return when the quarantine ends.”

An avenue in Cali, Colombia, on 1 April. Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images

Indeed, the fear among environmentalists and residents is that, rather than attempting to maintain the low levels of pollution in the world’s biggest capitals, when industry and cars kick back into action post-lockdown, the situation will go back to square one, and perhaps even worsen, as people and industry attempt to make up for the lost months.

The signs from China, which is coming out of the other side of the coronavirus outbreak and where lockdowns are loosening up, are not positive. For the first four weeks after the Chinese new year holiday in late January, when the coronavirus outbreak was at its worst, pollution levels fell 25% across the country. But since early March, levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution have begun to inch back up as the country gets back to work with factories, businesses and power plants re-opening and traffic returning.

Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst for the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, said: “The big question is whether government stimulus measures lead to pollution levels rebounding above the levels before the crisis, like happened after the 2008 financial crisis.”

(Source: The Guardian)