Saturday, February 15, 2014

Plant trees and save earth : Forests and Climate Change


Hi friends
I am doing Wold Bank MOOC course on Turn Down the heat: Why a 4 degree world should be avoided?

This page is created to display my final project for other course participants and evaluators.
Pl see and give your suggestions.
Sincerely,
Satyasai 


In the artifact given here, I tried to show that forest cover acts as umbrella to mother earth to protect from CO2.  Mother earth can happily smile once forests take care of the emissions and carbon sequestration.  Plant trees and save earth from climate change.
Forests have profound impact on climate change and climate change affects in turn forest cover.  However, annual deforestation is estimated to release CO2 in more qualtity than annual emissions from transport system.  Forests act as carbon sinks and help in absorbing CO2 in large quantities due to photosynthesis.  Also, forest cover gives shade that reduce soil temperature.  The continued existence of forests is important to prevent vicious cycle of rising temperatures –melting ice cap –release of GHG-which leads to temperature rise. 
As global warming proceeds the forest ecosystems have to move to more suitable locations as the existing locations become less suitable.  It is estimated that with increased global temperatures by 3 degree by 2100, the forest ecosystemes are likely to shift 500 km towards poles and 500 m to higher alitiudes.    Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that suitable climate are projected to shift in future and many tree species will not be able to change their geographic distribution fast enough to keep up with such shifts.  Often due to limited capability for the dispersal of seeds of several tree species, the composition of the forest ecosytems is likely to change.
Trees or lack of them, hence, makes a difference to our mother earth. Increased forest cover, thus, helps reduce mitigate global warming effects by acting as carbon sinks and reducing CO2 emissions that would otherwise occur from degradation or deforestation.