Human efforts towards making the planet greener are finally paying off. After looking over 20 years’ worth of satellite images from around the entire globe, NASA has concluded that the earth is greener now than it has been in the last two decades.
Over the last 20 years, people have planted areas of leafy green vegetation around the world that amount to the size of the giant Amazon rainforest. A third of this greening of the Earth is thanks to China and India.
This NASA map shows the rate of greenery increases around the world. The biggest increase in foliage in an area is indicated by a dark green. Source: NASA Earth Observatory
China has been working hard to stop soil erosion, air pollution and climate change by actively planting forests and conserving the ones the country has. The nation plans to increase its forest coverage from 21% to 23% by the end of next year. Just over 40% of China’s contribution to global greening is made up by the forests it already has.
In 2018, 60 000 soldiers were deployed by the state to plant trees in an area the size of Ireland around Beijing to make forests like this one. Photo: Zhang Kaiyv.
India, on the other hand, has seen a burst in greening because of a huge increase in agriculture to feed its growing population. In the last decade alone, agriculture has increased by 40%.
The majority of the greening that has happened in India has been because of agricultural plantations, like tea farms. Photo: Pixabay
How scientists can be so sure that this is happening is that the satellites have taken incredibly clear photos of every place on the planet at least four times every day for the past two decades. They can examine the planet down to 500m from the ground.
However, NASA and academic have warned that greening on one side of the world doesn’t offset the environmental damage on the other side. The loss of natural vegetation in places like Brazil and Indonesia still have dire consequences for the planet’s overall health.
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However, they say that this greening shows that humans can help the planet to heal.
‘Once people realise there is a problem, they tend to fix it … Humans are incredibly resilient. That’s what we see in the satellite data,’ says Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA.
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Image: Even agriculture helps to make the Earth greener. Photo: Simon Fanger.
