Forests and Climate Change are intrinsically linked. By removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it during photosynthesis to carbon, a process referred to as carbon sequestration, trees and forests play a playing a major role in mitigating climate change.
Three scientists in New York City thought that more forest could help slow climate change. So, they thought that would be a great idea to forest the Sahara Desert. You may think that with all this heat and sand in the Sahara that would be rather… difficult, but they argue that it can be done. Further, they conclude that it “probably provides the best, near-term route to complete control of greenhouse gas induced global warming“.
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Leonard Ornstein, a cell biologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and two climate modellers at NASA, Igor Aleinov and David Rind, have outlined their idea in a paper published in the Journal of Climatic Change.
They say that we can create forests of fast growing trees such as eucalyptus that can withstand the heat, in the deserts of the Sahara and Australian outback by watered them with desalinated seawater. Their idea is to build a string of coastal desalination plants and then use a sort of vast drip-irrigation network to deliver water in the desert.
The trio have run some climate change simulations and they found that the whole desert, if forested, would probably cool by about eight degrees Celsius, and that rainfall in the area would probably increase by about a thousand millimetres a year. In addition, their calculations suggest that a forested Sahara could remove from the atmosphere around 8bn tonnes of carbon a year.
Certainly, it does not come cheap. The three scientists have estimated that the whole project would be about two trillion dollars a year, every year. There are also other issues; turning Sahara into forest, may disrupt neighbouring ecological systems, Nevertheless, it is an idea that could help mitigating climate change while transforming a desert into a green, productive region.
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