Julien David

Reforestation efforts are on the increase globally. The effort is to combat the devastating effects of deforestation. Some of the worlds largest countries are working to plant hundreds of millions of trees to help.

As the Showtime special Years of Living Dangerously outlines that deforestation is one of the biggest concerns among climatologists. Especially the deforestation taking place in Indonesia on a large scale. Also the combined tragedies of the desertification and drought in the primary river waterways in Syria contributed significantly to destabilization in the country and ultimately preceded the current conflict and bloodshed. As the Google Earth scientist mentioned the double impact of deforestation, where the country clear cuts forest and rain-forest taking out commission large absorbers of CO2 once cut down, then to quickly make the land ready for growing Palm oil in Indonesia, they burn the undergrowth and emit more carbon in numerous forms back into the atmosphere.

Reforestation, surprisingly has a serious fan from an unlikely source, the World Bank. Projects in many countries, under the auspices of the UNFCCC and their CDM program are replanting trees globally at staggering rates.

The afforestation and reforestation funded by the World Bank and UN are establishing projects that look at sustainable foresting, creating healthy ecosystems around them and improvement of watersheds.

“To sequester CO2 through forest restoration of small watershed areas and test and pilot how reforestation activities generate high-quality emission reductions in greenhouse gases that can be measured, monitored and verified”, reported from the Guanxi Watershed Management project.

Projects in the Pearl River Basin area of China, the Lakhdar project in India and the Nicaragua Precious Woods projects have global partners with funds and the know-how to co-ordinate large scale climate improvement through reforestation.

UNFCCC, World Bank