Trees

Forests in the eastern United States appear to be growing faster than they should be, and increases in temperature and carbon dioxide are the likely culprits.

“We’ve known for 30 or 40 years that extra CO2 and extra temperature cause trees to grow, most of the climate models predict this,” said Geoffrey Parker, of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland. “It’s just that there haven’t been many field studies that really corroborated it.”

Parker’s team used a combination of two types of tree data to put together a comprehensive look at how trees along the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay have been growing in recent years. They found that the forest, including both young and old trees, has been adding weight at an exceptionally high rate. In fact, in 90 percent of the measurements taken, the rate of growth of the trees was higher than the expected rate.

The world’s forests are being damaged by climate change-related heat and drought, even in areas not traditionally known for water shortages, U.S. Geological Survey researchers say in the first global assessment of tree deaths from heat stress and drought.

The findings highlight the very real risk that tree mortality could become a bigger problem as global climate change progresses.

They also suggest that emissions offset programs designed to prevent logging and clear cutting of forests are missing the big picture: Allowing polluters to pay to preserve or plant trees rather than reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions may keep one area of trees alive, but it continues to endanger forests around the world.

Tip O’Neil, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, once declared that “all politics is local”. The same might be said for climate change. While its consequences are global, its root cause is the greenhouse gas emissions each of us emits directly or indirectly from our vehicles, buildings and appliances.

If anthropogenic climate change is the result of the millions of energy decisions each of us makes in the course of our lives, then it stands to reason that the solution to climate change lies in making those decisions differently. Each us must sign a treaty with ourselves, a personal Kyoto Protocol. Without that individual commitment, no international agreement to mitigate global warming will be worth the recycled paper it’s written on.

This point came home recently when I met a woman named Clare Dakin in London. Clare is the UK’s representative for a program called Project Green Hands. Its objective is to reverse the desertification of Tamil Nadu, the seventh most populous state in India, by planting 114 million trees within the next 10 years.

So far, six million trees have been planted by 1 million people in three years, including 850,000 in a single day, a Guinness Book world record. The people who plant the trees are volunteers who each pledge to care for a single sapling for two years.