Despite new rhetoric over climate change, China is unlikely to see any real progress in environmental policies until its political system is overhauled, says Jonathan Watts.
Aren't anti-desertification initiatives generally just planting lines of trees and shrubs to stop the soil from being blown about and eroded away and to create cooler pockets for more native species to thrive in? They're more about restoring/expanding the previous environment, just in a way that's more robust against the things that drive desertification.
deserts actually do have lots of species that live there
deserts have some of the lowest biodiversity on the planet, and virtually no biomass. There is 10x less biomass in a desert than in grassland, and 70x less than in a forest.
you could add up all the animals and plants that lived in all of the world's deserts, it'd be an equivalent amount of life to New England + NY state
Also there'd be the formation of new life that wouldn't have otherwise existed, plus the partial reversal of global warming
of course, desert creatures are interesting and should be preserved. But turning deserts into greenery is just too big to pass up, you could literally use all of the newly acquired resources to feed those desert animals + have a huge surplus left over
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Aren't anti-desertification initiatives generally just planting lines of trees and shrubs to stop the soil from being blown about and eroded away and to create cooler pockets for more native species to thrive in? They're more about restoring/expanding the previous environment, just in a way that's more robust against the things that drive desertification.
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deserts have some of the lowest biodiversity on the planet, and virtually no biomass. There is 10x less biomass in a desert than in grassland, and 70x less than in a forest.
you could add up all the animals and plants that lived in all of the world's deserts, it'd be an equivalent amount of life to New England + NY state
Also there'd be the formation of new life that wouldn't have otherwise existed, plus the partial reversal of global warming
of course, desert creatures are interesting and should be preserved. But turning deserts into greenery is just too big to pass up, you could literally use all of the newly acquired resources to feed those desert animals + have a huge surplus left over
My understanding is that they're focusing on areas that the desert has expanded to over decades, not actually destroying long-standing desert biomes.