HN Reader

This and Bill Gates saying...

> “the doomsday outlook [on climate change] is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”

I guess it's cool there's something to be hopeful about, westerner's just seemed excited to make money off of melting ice in Greenland.

My immediate thought, yeah isnt that because they don't really naturally have the kinds of softwoods forests good for making boards and paper? And until more recently they were taking recycled paper/fiber from america in empty shipping containers returning.

The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.

India too has been adding more green cover than ever. Higher CO2 in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests. But more important factor is urbanization for India. As people move to cities the need to cut down trees goes down.

Wise to use forests to contain deserts. Problem is that China still plays a big role in importing deforestation-linked commodities and fund overseas projects that exacerbate global loses. There are low tree survival rates and falsified coverage, like the Three-North Shelterbelt program which is plagued by inefficiencies over its 40 years of operation.

It's also hard to balance afforestation without causing scarcity of water and displacement of native forest habitats. For example, instances where shrubs are misclassified as forests inflate the report figures. China seems to be the global leader in biodiversity loss, with about 80% of its coral reefs and 73% of its mangroves gone since 1950. Everyone knows their abusive fishing practices, and the millions of tons of plastic pollution into the ocean every year.

So, keep up the good environmental efforts, China, and hope you do even better.

I don’t know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.” Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.

Xi Jinping may be a rather dull person, but his most famous saying is “Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.” As for building roads — the Belt and Road Initiative speaks for itself. We’ve built bridges in Croatia, in Bangladesh, in Mozambique, and roads and railways all over the world. That slogan is probably engraved in every Chinese person’s memory.

I think they’re doing a great thing.

My area has seen some wildfire smoke season near the end of summer. It never happened when I was a kid. Now every summer there’s wildfire smoke for several days or several weeks.

The climate appears to be changing and heavily forested areas of midwest US and canada are on fire every summer.

Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become a tinderbox for wildfires.

Wondering if I should also pitch in a backhanded compliment for doing something good or if we already have enough of those in this thread.

How much of this is the result of reversing the deforestation caused by the Great Leap Forward and other anti-nature policies of the mid twentieth century?

It's not a bad thing if this is mostly just restoring forests ravaged by bad policy, but it's a bit odd to compare this reforestation, quantitatively, to what's going on in countries that didn't have a "war against nature".

It's really hard to understate how deforestation ravaged China - their forestry cover declined by almost half during The Great Leap Forward as the CCCP at the time pushed hard to exploit the land. As a result, there were severe and noticeable problems with flooding and desertification. So starting in the 70s they invested heavily in the "Three-North Shelter Forest Program" (aka the Great Green Wall). Although, probably more importantly, economic liberalization meant farming became more efficient and people could move towards cities and free up the land again.

I think more fascinating has been Russia's surge in forestry growth, also very notable in the report. Unlike China their forests have expanded almost completely accidentally. Communist-era collective farmlands have slowly been getting abandoned. Their frontier has been shrinking and the forests have crept in, tree growth being aided by longer growing period and thawing permafrost.

This sounds big but its less than the bare minimum required. Their coal emissions are insane. In my opinion its all anyone should be talking about when it comes to climate change.

Canada has added 20 million acres,

India 22 million acres,

Russia 52 million acres - an area about the size of Kansas.

I've been binging a lot of videos on things like rewilding and other approaches that can be used to restore landscapes. The Chinese have successfully executed a number of large scale projects over the decades. They started this early. Where other countries talked about doing things, the Chinese went ahead and did those things.

One of their projects is allowing them to undertake infrastructure projects in the desert. They simply stick bales of straw into ditches to stop soil being blown away by wind. The straw traps soil, water, and breaks down over a few years allowing plants to take hold. It's a simple approach that works. Very pramatic, dig a ditch, stick in some straw. Done. Repeat.

Outside of China, the green wall in Africa is a very pragmatic approach that involves digging a lot of half moon shaped ditches to trap rain water. Simple and effective.

Other approaches involve using fences to stop sheep and other grazers from preventing anything vaguely green tinted shoots from being eaten and giving them a chance to actually turn into trees.

What I like about these approaches is that some relatively simple measures can have big effects. People spend a lot of time hand wringing over seemingly insurmountable problems. The Chinese are showing that in addition to the power to destroy landscapes, we also have the power to remake them. It works. They aren't tree huggers. Better landscapes also mean local economies benefit. Deserts don't feed people. Water retention means agriculture gets a second chance.

What I admire in the Chinese is the pragmatic can do attitude. Their motivations are of course self serving. They value having clean air in their cities, clean drinking water, and a landscape that can support agriculture and infrastructure. And in the end that's the best kind of motivation you can get. It's something worth copying. Whenever economy, science, and environment align, everybody wins.

A lot of areas in the rest of the world that are subject to desertification, pollution, etc. are fixable. And there's value in fixing them that needs more attention. I don't see this as a green/left topic. If you exist on this planet, why wouldn't you want something to be done to clean up the mess we've all created in the last centuries? Breaking out this topic from the usual left/right day to day politics is key. The rest is just work. The Chinese put the rest of us to shame with hard work.

Give me less articles more GPS coordinates. I distrust the digital tree pulp and want to see the original tree pulp.

I always wondered why Western democracies want carbon taxes, when just reverting more land back to managed forests, seems like a much more reasoned solution. It would trap carbon, help wild life, and provide fresh air, and jobs in forestry, and renewable resources like wood. Seems to me Carbon Taxes primarily benefit the banks, and grow bureaucracy.

I do wonder about the quality of those forests. Monoculture plantations aren't the same as biodiverse ecosystems. Still, if the goal is to stabilize soil, reduce dust storms, and push back deserts, it's a step in the right direction

While Russia cuts more and more timber for export to China. In return for the support in the war (drone components, etc) China asks for even more and more timber and fresh water from Baikal.

> Since 1990 ... surpassed by China, which managed to add a staggering 173 million acres....

> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest

Where did the rest come from?

Does this mean that you can drive in the forest for an entire day and still be in the forest?

How many football fields is that though?

This seems like gross, and I wonder what the net is. It seems impossible that there's no deforestation in the places mentioned int the article, and unlikely that the net is positive.

Of course, planting is one thing, maintaining is another. Many areas turn green for a few years and then fade back to desert. The real challenge is building an ecological culture, not just a green map.

Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the few centuries prior to today. So you have Europeans making tiny recoveries to their rampant destruction of their environment celebrating that fact while preventing others from doing what they did. There is one path to this: first clear cut your forests so you can build your industry; then build your industry so you can be prosperous; then rebuild your forests. If you had 100 acres of forest, and cut it down to 1 acre, then you can build 1 acre at the end and claim a 100% improvement. The next year another acre still is 50% improvement. Can any who have retained their forest boast such improvement?

China is following this path and we will celebrate it. As always, do not do what the developed nations say you should. Instead do what they did. After all, Norway did not become prosperous by keeping their oil in the ground.

finally some good news.

I'm starting to think that we're the baddies.

One more interesting thing: https://english.news.cn/20251022/ab149540692140f3836a60e22dd...

A very worrying number of people nowadays seem to think that forests are a thing to counter climate change. What is the species composition being planted? Is it appropriate to the location? Reforestation must be about recreating _forest ecosystems_, not about creating the photosynthetic counterpart of a vast fucking solar farm.

It's all desert forests though.

> Drawing on national reports prepared for FAO, ...

> Since 2005, the FRA has relied on data provided by a network of officially nominated national correspondents...

My understanding is that these reports are heavily based on data reported by respective governments. I think "officially nominated national correspondents" means bureaucrats of different governments.

But the governments of Russia, India, China are all known to lie. A lot. About a lot of things. I would know.

My default stance is to be skeptical of such claims based on national reports. Independent verification using satellite imagery seems like a better approach.

I'm curious how much of it is fake; at-least some of it is. To get financial incentives from the central government, local governments have pained rocks green and planted plastic trees to make it look like they planted trees in satellite photos.

Meanwhile we're speedrunning DustBowl 2.0 just in time for its 100th anniversary.