NASA confirms — India and China have made the Earth greener
Day 284 / 365
No, this is not one of those fake WhatsApp forwards that you get, saying that India’s National Anthem has been chosen as the world’s best National Anthem. This one is legit, you can check it out on the official NASA website here.
India and China have apparently made the Earth greener than it was 20 years ago. NASA has confirmed, and in the article, they have commented that India and China being responsible for this is a bit counterintuitive.
Now get this, the amount of increase we have had in the leaf area over the last 20 years is equivalent to the area covered by the entire Amazon forest! Each year we are adding two million square miles of leaf area.
India and China have the largest populations by a long distance, and they cover only about 9% of the land area. Still, they have contributed to more than a third of all this new global greening. Scientists first observed this greening in the 1990s and thought that this was an effect of global warming leading to a wetter climate. But the new data shows that there is definitely some human contribution to this.
While situations like the Arrey forest where trees are being cut down to make way for development are not so good, we can at least have comfort in the fact that the efforts that have been made in replantation and reforestation over the last two decades have not been in vain. This gives us hope that while humans might have the capacity to ruin the environment, we are just as capable of getting it better as well.
This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog — The Kite Experiment