HONG KONG: Nearly four billion tonnes of additional carbon have been taken out of the atmosphere in the past decade as the planet’s plant cover has expanded, according to satellite data.
But that’s still less than 7 per cent of total carbon emissions of 60 billion tonnes over the same period.
The change has been attributed to reforestation projects in China, wilderness reclamation of abandoned farms in the former Soviet Union, and higher rainfall on savannahs, particularly in Australia.
The net increase in vegetation masks the loss of tropical rainforests, according to the report published in Nature Climate Change.
The worst losses have been on the fringes of the Amazon and in Indonesia’s provinces of Sumatra and Kalimantan. Rainforests have a disproportionately large share of the world’s biodiversity.
And the improvement doesn’t fully make up for the losses in the previous ten years.
The new research, the first to measure aboveground biomass carbon (ABC) by satellite monitoring of passive microwave radiation, was conducted by scientists in Australia, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and China led by Dr Yi Liu of the University of New South Wales.
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