China and India are making the planet greener, NASA says

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China and India are making the planet greener, NASA says
by Muskan Priya \| 16-02-2019 17:40 0
The Earth is facing a climate crisis, but it's also getting greener and leafier. According to new research, the rise is largely courtesy of China and India. A study by NASA, based on extensive satellite imagery and published in the journal Nature Sustainability, has revealed that the two countries with the world's biggest populations are also responsible for the largest increase in green foliage. Since the turn of the new millennium, the planet's green leaf area has increased by 5%, or over two million square miles. That's an area equivalent to the sum total of the Amazon rainforests, NASA says. But researchers stressed that the new greenery does not neutralize deforestation and its negative impacts on ecosystems elsewhere. A third of the leaf increase is attributable to China and India, due to the implementation of major tree planting projects alongside a vast increase in agriculture. "China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9% of the planet's land area covered in vegetation a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from overexploitation," Chi Chen, the study's lead author and a graduate researcher at Boston University's Department of Earth and Environment, said in a statement. Between 2000 and 2017, a NASA sensor known as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) gathered high-resolution data of the Earth's surface from aboard two satellites, the Terra and the Aqua. Using the MODIS data, researchers discovered that China is the source of a quarter of the increase in green leaf area, despite possessing only 6.6% of the world's vegetated area. Forests account for 42% of that increase, while croplands make up a further 32%. China's increase in forest area is the result of forest conservation and expansion programs, NASA said, established to combat the impacts of climate change, air pollution and soil erosion. India has contributed a further 6.8% rise in green leaf area, with 82% from croplands and 4.4% from forests. Both countries have engineered a significant increase in food production, thanks to "multiple cropping practices," which see fields replanted and crops harvested multiple times each year. "Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more have increased by about 35-40% since 2000 to feed their large populations," NASA said. Refrence: edition-m.cnn.com

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