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Those people who look at the world as it is, rather than as how their preconceptions tell them it should be, have realised that forests have been growing for some time in the advanced capitalist countries of North America and Western Europe. Reduced land use for agriculture and wood burning, and better forestry management and replanting is the proximate cause. The fundamental cause is that  richer societies look after forests better.

A paper in Science this week reports the same trend in China. Records indicate that the 102 million hectares which were forested in 1949 fell to a nadir of about 95 million hectares in 1980. Since then various developments caused the forested area to rise to 106 million hectares by 1998. It is estimated that this new forest sequestered 20 million metric tons of carbon annually, a small but significant contribution to the total carbon taken up by forests worldwide.

The authors of another paper in the same issue calculate that in the United States reforestation is sequestering even more. Planned forestry, abandonment of marginal land and fire suppression has led to new forests and increasing brushwood and undergrowth in existing forests which has sequestered some 300 to 600 million metric tons of carbon annually. This is a huge amount - about 30 percent of fossil fuel emissions worldwide.

iGreen comment

China is hardly a capitalist paradise, but it has moved significantly towards respecting private property and individual freedom since the late 1970s. Its citizens have benefited enormously from the material wealth that has resulted, despite remaining in absolute terms poor compared with the west. It is good to see that, as iGreens would have predicted, the benefit is also accruing to the environment.

Fang J et al. Science 292: 2320 (2001)

Pacala S et al Science 292: 2316 (2001)

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Last modified: September 10, 2006