carbon-emissions | GarryRogers Nature Conservation

“When 61-year old Mercy Joshua was young, the vast forests of southeastern Kenya teemed with wildlife, but decades of unchecked deforestation by locals have devastated the land. She watched forests dwindle and rivers dry up across her homeland of Kasigau—a semi-arid savanna grassland dotted with shrubs, woodland and small rugged hills—as people cut down the trees to scratch a living by selling them for firewood. But now, after decades of degradation, a local project has found a way to preserve the forests and support the community by getting international companies to pay to plant trees.”

“We were losing everything, but thanks to the project we have learnt even how to live with the wild animals,” Joshua, a mother of four, told AFP.

“These days, we don’t cut down trees… they are our friends,” she added.

“The project has breathed new life into Kasigau, a 500,000 acre (200,000 hectare) dryland forest 330 kilometres (205 miles) southeast of the capital Nairobi that connects the two halves of Kenya’s renowned Tsavo national park.

“She watched forests dwindle and rivers dry up across her homeland of Kasigau—a semi-arid savanna grassland dotted with shrubs, woodland and small rugged hills—as people cut down the trees to scratch a living by selling them for firewood.

“But now, after decades of degradation, a local project has found a way to preserve the forests and support the community by getting international companies to pay to plant trees.

“We were losing everything, but thanks to the project we have learnt even how to live with the wild animals,” Joshua, a mother of four, told AFP.

“These days, we don’t cut down trees… they are our friends,” she added.

“Founded in 2009, it is part of a UN-backed carbon credit scheme aimed at stopping 54 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere over the next 30 years, equivalent to 1.2 million tonnes a year.”

Continue Reading: phys.org

GR: These programs can have short-term benefits. But nothing is sustainable when population continues to grow.

MADRAVENSPEAK “Consider this. What if all life on earth could go extinct because of man-made climate change?” — “Last Hours” documentary.

There is little, these days, that brings state power in line

with the best interests of the public or the planet. Those in power devour Koch money for breakfast and deliver destruction of the planet all day long. Concentrated corporate and special-interest power monetize what was sacred, and have taken over governments, including our own, cannibalizing the planet to exhaustion. This trajectory is accelerating such that this may be the last century of life on this planet. Each of the five former known extinctions eradicated more than half of life on earth. Several of them involved global warming.

Everyone should watch Thom Hartmann’s short “Last Hours“, a preamble to a documentary in the works, covering the projections of how climate change will likely play out. Rather than a meteorite, our greatest threat is “under ground, under water, under the ice, where trillions of tons of carbon lie in wait in the form of frozen methane.”