Unless we rapidly improve our forest cover we will face a WORLD WIDE disaster.
Planting trees is an excellent way to make a positive difference to the environment. They're also a great way to experience the region's parks — Encouraging people to join planting days in parks that they haven't visited before, and make the most of a rewarding family day out.
Planting a will give campers and picnickers shade and shelter. It will also stabilize the coastal edge and protect and enhance the coastal forest remnants.
New trees are planted to maintain and enhance biodiversity, and to protect park life including native plants, birds, fish and insects, and their support systems and food supplies.
Tree planting also goes a long way towards nursing our damaged ecosystems back to health. It speeds up natural regeneration, reduces flooding and erosion, and improves water quality in our rivers and beaches, making them safe for swimming.
Coastal water degradation is from rapid population growth, from chemicals used in agriculture, from raw and poorly treated sewage input, from heavy metals and oil product pollution.
persistent organic pollutants-chemical substances that persist in the environment, are increasingly being absorbed.
These chemicals that bio accumulate through the food web, now show in the once pristine Arctic waters.
The disposal of plastic in the seas and oceans has become a serious problem for wildlife.
Excess nitrogen fertilizer flushed into the gulf, and a reduction of the Mississippi basin floodplains, has resulted in the Gulf of Mexico becoming one of the largest dead zones on the planet.
The wetlands once acted as a buffer to storms coming in from the sea but Louisiana has lost about a half million acres of coast to erosion since 1930.
The lost wetlands had been built by the Mississippi River, which is now corralled by levees and is bringing little replacement sediment to the Gulf mouth.
Even before Katrina the City of New Orleans and Louisiana needed billions of dollars to help restore coastal wetlands.
No longer having the sediment wetlands to act as a buffer
In Europe at least one-third of the sewage flowing into the Black Sea, the Balkans, the Carpathian basin, remains unprocessed.
The Sea of Azov and the heavily polluted Bosporus no longer have fish Mackerel, green fish, the most commonly caught fish that used to swim in these waters, have become non-existent.
Rejections of scientific advice, both in reducing pollution, and on reducing catches to safeguard fish stocks, has resulted in Europe's stocks of fish being depleted on a disastrous
The number of "dead zones" in the world's oceans may have increased by a third in just two years, threatening fish stocks and the people who depend on them,
Fertilizers, sewage, fossil fuel burning and other pollutants have led to a doubling in the number of oxygen-deficient coastal areas every decade since the 1960's.
Now experts estimate there are 200 so-called ocean dead zones, compared with 150 two years ago.
The climate is changing so quickly that coral reefs don't keep up ... the loss of that ecosystem would be tremendous."
KENYA — 22 February, 2005
Nearly five years ago, the government imposed a ban on logging in order to curb deforestation and to conserve the country's major water catchment areas. "
If the stratosphere will continue to cool, or if ozone levels will return to levels of the past, or if the increasing stress of unstable monsoons and floods, of drought bowls, of vast wind forces, will continue in their exaggerated patterns.Disaster is a reality we expect.
The huge expanse of western Siberia is thawing for the first time since its formation, 11,000 years ago.
This could potentially act as a tipping point, causing global warming to snowball, scientists fear.
More than 90% of the original national forest cover has now been lost.
The situation is an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming,"
The whole western Siberian sub-Arctic region has started to thaw, this "has happened in the last three or four years".
The melting glaciers will ultimately trigger more droughts, expand desertification and increase sand storms."
The water running off the plateau is increasing soil erosion and so allowing the deserts to spread. Sandstorms, blowing in from the degraded land, are already plaguing the country.
Perhaps worst of all, the melting threatens to disrupt water supplies over much of Asia.
Many of the continent's greatest rivers — including the Yangtze, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yellow River — rise on the plateau.
In China alone, 300 million people depend on water from the glaciers for their survival. Yet the plateau is drying up, threatening to escalate an already dire situation across the country
Biomass burning. Lightning and human torching causes fire in forests, in grasslands, on savannas and on agricultural lands. Studies by scientists indicate the doubling of the moisture content in the stratosphere over the last 50 years has been caused, at least in part, by the increase in biomass burning. Water vapor shifts from the troposphere into the stratosphere, and the higher humidity helps in the destruction of the ozone layer.Catalysis takes place.
With climate change making the forests drier, the cutting of forests, combined with lightning, is allowing huge areas to become ignited.
With the opening of forests, for every acre of forest destroyed, at least one more acre burns in ground fire. Over the last few decades, millions of hectares of trees have been lost by lightning causes, extreme weather conditions, and by human torching.
restoration of forested areas to take care of the demand is far from adequate.
Major players in the global development race have used public money to harvest forests, especially the tropical forests that remain, and have done so with minimal or no environmental, freedom-of-information or human rights policies. Little has been done to restore the forests.
when the environment is destroyed, plundered or mismanaged, we undermine our quality of life and that of future generations.
One way of cleaning up after ourselves would be to throw less away, designing products to be recycled or even just to last longer.
Previous generations worked on the assumption that discarding our waste was a proper way to be rid of it, so we used to dump nuclear materials and other potential hazards at sea, confident they would be dispersed in the depths. We now think that is too risky
Ask not for whom the bell tolls — it tolls for thee, and for me
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