Global Greening
Description
Francis Heylighen:
"A common concern is that human progress comes at the expense of the natural environment. If economic growth necessarily destroys ecosystems and natural resources, then rising human well-being might be undermining the long-term viability of life on Earth.
To test this, we need global indicators of ecological change.
One of the most informative is vegetation cover. Since plants form the base of the food chain, more vegetation generally means more biomass.
Using satellite observations from NASA, scientists have tracked global vegetation over time.
The idea is simple: the greener a region on a satellite picture, the more vegetation (leaf area); the browner, the less vegetation. By comparing such pictures over decades, scientist have been able to track which regions have become greener, and which browner,
as shown in the pictures below:
The result is striking: many more areas are greening than browning. Global leaf area has increased significantly since the 1980s—a phenomenon known as global greening.
It means that forests and grasslands have overall expanded, while deserts and barren lands have receded. The planet has become measurably greener.
The following factors appear to contribute:
- increased CO₂ helps plants grow faster
- warmer temperatures help trees grow in northern and mountainous regions
- large-scale reforestation efforts (notably in China and India)
- measures to better retain rain water in dry regions (notably Sahel, India and China)
- more intensive agriculture: more and bigger crops per acre, more wide-spread irrigation and fertilization
spontaneous regeneration of forests in lands no longer needed for farming (notably in Eastern Europe, France and the US)
Recovery is not limited to plants. Thanks to conservation and rewilding efforts, wild animals are returning to many regions where they had disappeared—such as wolves, beavers, lynxes and bears in Western Europe.
This does not mean that all ecological problems are solved — far from it. Biodiversity loss and local degradation remain serious issues.
While forests overall are expanding, there is still serious, albeit diminishing, deforestation in tropical regions, such as Brazil. And of course we need to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions in order to reduce the more serious risks of climate change, such as tipping points.
However, global greening does show that, at the largest scale, the biosphere is not simply collapsing. It is adapting to changing conditions—and in an important respect expanding."
(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/is-the-world-on-the-verge-of-collapse)