I was quite amused when I got my daily dose of Reuters’ Planet Ark bulletin this morning. Tucked away somewhere in the middle of the bulletin was one link: “Trees for Kids: Indonesia’s Way of Beating Global Warming“. I said I would read that and I did.
Section of Rainforest in Kenya (in Wikimedia Commons)
It turns out that a certain Indonesian city grappling with the effects of deforestation has instructed all family-hungry citizens to plant a tree before they start these social units. Everyone who wants to get married or apply for a birth certificate must plant a tree.” Syahrum Syah Setia, the head of Balikpapan City’s Environmental Impact Management Agency is reported to have said.
The agency is worried that the city’s condition, which is already worrying could get worse and they have to do something to tackle global warming. Now this is some radical action by the local council. A while ago I posted in this blog a simulation of how many children were being born each minute. Imagine if the entire world would plant a tree for each child born.
According to the Reuters report, East Kalimantan loses 350,000-500,000 ha (865,000 – 1.24-million acres) of forest each year and the government can only replant 30,000 ha (74,000 acres) of that. The report also says that Indonesia has lost an estimated 70% of its original forestland. Luckily there are still some 91-million ha (225 million acres) still left.
That is Indonesia which incorporates parts of the Bornean rainforests. Imagine a country like Kenya with only 1.7 million hectares of forest cover (of which 160,000 ha is plantation forest) and a population of 35-million people. This forest cover is less than 2% of the entire area of land in the country. If Kenya would implement this principle of a tree per child, then we could re-generate the lost forest cover and expand it further in a very short time.
The worlds other largest rainforest are mostly in Brazil and Congo. These are dissappearing rather rapidly and the only reason they are not entirely gone is because they are huge. But given the current rate of destruction, humans will surely lay waste to these important biodiversity areas within our lifetime.
So once again. Let’s emulate this obscure Indonesian city and start planting a tree for every child you have brought into this world…and…er…for every marriage you have blundered into.
