NASA observes the Greening of the “Blue Planet”

But more leafy vegetables and grain crops don’t make up for

the environmental damage from tropical deforestation.

By Ken Hickson

Green news is good news and helps balance all the bad news about the environment. Of course.

It’s certainly not fake news, but maybe we need to maintain perspective when we read headlines that shout out “China and India are making the planet greener”.

It was a headlined report by Emily Dixon of CNN. Read on and you’ll learn it’s from a study by NASA, based on extensive satellite imagery and published in the journal Nature Sustainability. It revealed that the two countries with the world’s biggest populations are also responsible for the largest increase in green foliage.

Read the Nature Sustainability abstract, which clearly states: “Satellite data show increasing leaf area of vegetation due to direct factors (human land-use management) and indirect factors (such as climate change, CO₂ fertilization, nitrogen deposition and recovery from natural disturbances). Among these, climate change and CO₂fertilization effects seem to be the dominant drivers”.

It goes on to tell us that recent satellite data (2000–2017) reveal “a greening pattern that is strikingly prominent in China and India and overlaps with croplands world-wide”.

To give it credit, China alone accounts for 25% of the global net increase in leaf area with only 6.6% of global vegetated area, according to the study.

The CNN report said the NASA researchers discovered that in China “forests account for 42% of that increase, while croplands make up a further 32%.

Further, China’s increase in forest area “is the result of forest conservation and expansion programs, established to combat the impacts of climate change, air pollution and soil erosion”.

For India, the situation was seen as a little different. The sub-continent contributed a further 6.8% rise in green leaf area, but with 82% of it from croplands and a mere 4.4% from forests.

NASA notes in the study – and in the CNN report – that both countries have engineered a significant increase in food production, thanks to “multiple cropping practices,” which see fields replanted and crops harvested multiple times each year.

“Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more have increased by about 35-40% since 2000 to feed their large populations,” NASA said.

The study shows that the direct factor is a key driver of the ‘Greening Earth’, accounting for over a third, and probably more, of the observed net increase in green leaf area. It highlights the need for a realistic representation of human land-use practices in Earth system models.

But – and a big but – researchers stressed that “the new greenery does not neutralize deforestation” and its negative impacts on ecosystems elsewhere.

The researchers stress, in the NASA statement, that “the gain in greenness seen around the world and dominated by India and China does not offset the damage from loss of natural vegetation in tropical regions, such as Brazil and Indonesia”.

There are serious consequences for sustainability and biodiversity.

This puts things in perspective, as do reports from other global authorities, like FAO’s annual State of the Forests, which clearly state that the world keeps losing tree cover and that “time is running out for the world’s forests, whose total area is shrinking by the day”.

Halting deforestation, managing forests sustainably, restoring degraded forests and adding to worldwide tree cover all require actions to avoid potentially damaging consequences for the planet and its people, according to The State of the World’s Forests 2018.

FAO makes the point that “forests and trees contribute far more to human livelihoods than is commonly known, playing crucial roles in food security, drinking water, renewable energy and rural economies. They provide around 20 percent of income for rural households in developing countries – notably more in many areas – and fuel for cooking and heating for one in every three people around the world.”

“Forests are critical to livelihoods” said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva. “Healthy and productive forests are essential to sustainable agriculture and we have proof of the significance of forests and trees for the quality of water, for contributing to the energy needs of the future, and for designing sustainable, healthy cities.”

Mongabay, ever watchful when it comes to deforestation and other damaging “environmental crimes”, noted when the 2018 FAO report came out, that forests can help the world achieve at least 10 (and possibly more) of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) the international community signed up to at a historic U.N. summit in 2015.

It quoted State of the Forests lead author Eva Muller: “The branches of trees and forests reach out across the SDGs.”

It’s a big claim, as the SDGs cover everything from poverty to hunger, gender inequality to climate change. But the report makes convincing evidence-based arguments for its position.

First, it provides an update of the current situation for the world’s forests, and it’s not all bad news.

While deforestation is still happening, it has slowed, and in some areas of the world, has begun to reverse. The FAO’s Global Forests Resource Assessment found that the world’s forest area decreased from 31.6 percent of total land area to 30.6 percent between 1990 and 2015.

That loss seems to be slowing down. At a global level, the report finds, the net loss of forest area has decreased from 0.18 percent in the 1990s to 0.08 percent over the last five years. The picture is mixed, though. While forest cover has increased in Europe, the reverse is true in Southeast Asia.

Talking about Southeast Asia,  Mongabay was quick to draw attention to another report recently that industries that cause the loss of rainforest and peatlands in Southeast Asia were bankrolled to the tune of $62 billion between 2013 and 2018, according to new data released by the Forests and Finance campaign of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).

In the Mongabay report by James Fair (5 February 2019) “Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Malaysian banks were the biggest funders of so-called forest risk activities and were least likely to have internal policies that restricted damage to the environment from the activities they funded, RAN concludes”.

According to the Forests and Finance campaign director, Tom Picken, eliminating or restricting the financial support for forest-risk businesses – defined as unsustainable palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber and timber developments – is “the most significant action that can be taken to reduce their impact”. The campaign is a collaboration between RAN, the NGO TuK Indonesia, and a Netherlands-based not-for-profit called Profundo.

Also in on the act of dealing with deforestation by utilising technology is PEFC  – Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification. A clear demonstration of the importance of IT in supporting traceability for a sustainable supply chain was one of the key outcomes of a seminar, held on 29 November 2018 at the Singapore Sustainability Academy.

The seminar brought together people and organizations involved in utilizing technologies for sustainable forest management and responsible trade, thereby enabling detection of illegal logging operations, unchecked deforestation and preventing the deprivation of sustainable livelihood opportunities for small holders and local communities.

“In Myanmar, we are helping stakeholders to use IT at the landscape scale to bring sustainable management to Myanmar’s forests, involving public and private sector participants,” explained Richard Laity, PEFC International.

Myanmar is a good example where science and technology is being put to good use, drawing on Double Helix Tracking to verify the origin of timber and track the supply chain from source to consumer. Here’s the story about Double Helix when its work first came to light in a Reuters article by David Fogarty.

So good news comes with the “greening” of India and China to boost food production, but the bad news continues in many other places where deforestation is running riot.

“Step back for a second and think about recent efforts to address deforestation in Southeast Asia,” Picken said in an interview with Mongabay.

“Take the Norway effort, which pledged to put in US$1 billion [to stop deforestation in Indonesia], and compare that with $62 billion over five years. It is absolutely critical that the allocation of capital stops encouraging deforestation.”

Word is that Norway is finding it difficult to spend its billion dollars in Indonesia as viable, fundable projects are not coming up fast enough and the very necessary government oversight and regulation is missing.

Undeterred, Norway is adopting a different tack and pledged last June to spend Euros 15 million to a partnership between INTERPOL, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the RHIPTO-Norwegian Center for Global Analyses to combat illegal deforestation.

According to Interpol, organized criminals make US$50-152 billion a year illegally cutting down invaluable tropical forests and their activities have detrimental consequences for sustainable development in rainforest nations and the global climate.

All this goes beyond the desirability of keeping trees intact to maintain green cover. It’s acknowledged that halting and reversing land degradation and tropical deforestation could provide up to 30 per cent of the climate change solution.

Interpol reports that “key rainforest countries have estimated illegal logging rates of anywhere between 50 to 85 per cent. This high number stems from the multiple opportunities of breaking the law throughout the whole deforestation value chain – from bribes, corruption and fake licences, to illegal land conversion, illegal export of timber and hiding the money in tax havens”.

It doesn’t stop there. Interpol says that companies operating illegally, organized criminal groups and even cartels are destroying the planet’s forests.

“The deforestation has vast impacts not only on climate change, but also on indigenous peoples living in the rainforests and the unique biodiversity that the rainforests are home to”, Interpol stresses, making clear that its out “to dismantle the criminal networks behind environmental crime using intelligence-driven investigations”.

PEFC, Interpol, FAO and many others like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the World Resources Council are putting money and effort into helping countries and forest companies to adopt responsible and sustainable forest management, and at the same time, create awareness of illegal logging, deforestation and other environmental crimes.

PEFC for one, is not giving up. In fact, it is working even harder this year – its 20^th anniversary  – to help countries in Southeast Asia to get to grips with the problem of deforestation and illegal logging, and to introduce responsible and sustainable forest management.