Earth is experiencing climate change on a scale and pace never seen before since human species have been on the planet, and we are causing it by pumping more heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere than the Earth’s natural system can take out.
Now fixing a problem as massive as climate change is going to take a ton of different solutions but more and more people are asking if trees might be a big part of the answer. For the past 370 million years, they have been one of the major ways Earth sucks excess carbon out of the atmosphere and stores it away. And, along with green plants and algae, this natural technology captures carbon better and cheaper than any human technology that has been designed to quench carbon emissions so far.
We got about 6 trillion trees before humans started cutting them down and now we are left with roughly about half the number of trees i.e 3 trillion trees. So, ideally we should get back to 6 trillion trees to get things right, but we need space for settlement and much more for agriculture.
Therefore, we at SankalpTaru have incorporated a sustainable model of agroforestry to support the agricultural sector of India. This model not only creates a socio-economic impact on our farmer beneficiaries to uplift their livelihoods by planting fruit bearing and native species of trees on their lands but also helps carbon sequestration.
And now talking about the tropical forests which beyond their carbon capturing efficiency , also act like the planet’s air conditioning system are at a great risk. They pull moisture out of the ground, release water vapor into the sky and literally create rain and weather patterns across the globe.
However, most of the deforestation is happening in Earth’s tropical regions. If tropical deforestation were a country, it would be the third biggest emitter of carbon after China and the US. Cutting down these forests can raise the nearby temperatures by as much as 3 degree Celsius.
But with the help of our corporate and retail donors, we have created and are creating a number of biodiverse, mini forests across India by planting trees on the denuded rural and urban areas, regenerating them into self-sustainable ecosystems. This afforestation program is utilising the free and non utilised barren spaces in creating mini carbon sinks.
We have our campaigns running in 23 states, catering to the ecological diversity of India with native tree species plantation and our online tree plantation platform helps our donors to these from the comfort of their homes. Our aim is to continue to bring awareness and sensitise all age categories of India that their minor efforts can actually impact in reversing the climate change.
To conclude, trees are the big carbon storage machines that sucks C02 out of the atmosphere to store them inside themselves at a much cheaper cost. There is more carbon locked up in the world’s trees than in all the fossil fuels remaining in the ground. Cutting and burning these trees just puts that C02 back into the atmosphere. However, planting trees together with adopting a sustainable lifestyle and drastically reducing global carbon footprint have a potential to ensure that the global temperature doesn’t rise beyond 2 degree Celsius.
On reading this article, if you wish to plant a tree but are unaware of the place where you can go then click here www.sankalptaru.org and contribute for tree plantation PAN India.
Let’s make this planet greener with every click.
