> Forests and bushes now cover over 2% of Iceland, Vísir reports. That number may not seem like much, but since 1990, the surface area covered by forest or shrubs in Iceland has increased more than six times over – from 7,000 hectares to 45,000. In 20 years, the number is expected to be 2.6%.
And from another article :
> The Forest Service intends to deliver six million plants this year, says Þröstur, which is equivalent to pre-crash levels of production. “It was around five million last year, and four million the year before that. This is a rapid increase. Then we need seven to eight million next year, which we may not manage, and ten to twelve in 2025.”
Finland has 23 million hectares (76%) of forest cover.
Probably that only works for people that are from nearby Finland and/or into geography, though. For huge scales like these, I'm thinking degrees might theoretically be a better unit, since it's easier to visualize a fraction of the globe (presuming people know there's 360 degrees around the globe) than picturing hundreds of thousands of some other unit.
I'm all for planting more Icelandic trees, but I don't think you're getting as much bang for your buck as you could.
You know what would really be better than planting trees? For the world to stop burning so much coal.
40% of global electricity is from coal. Europe needs to increase coal usage because of the war.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/germany-coal-renewable-energ...
There are 8 billion people on the planet. “Hey, everyone stop what you’re doing, let’s all do this” is quite ineffective. We don’t need to stop planting trees in Iceland in order to save the rain forests.
Again, I think planting Icelandic trees is awesome! Just since OP specifically mentioned "offset my carbon emissions" I thought I'd shill one of my favorite ways of doing that :)
I'd expect the politicians to be launching a WWII-style industrial mobilization to ramp up heat pump installations. Even if they can't switch away from coal / natural gas this year, typical heat pump coefficients of power are well above 4. Going from 100% gas furnaces to 100% heat pumps powered off of natural gas peaker plants would more than halve natural gas demand! (And, in coming years, the natural gas plants could be replaced with greener options.)
Or put another way, because they didn't bother to become energy independent and shut down nuclear plants instead of investing in more.
Also, I wouldn’t mind retiring early and doing some tree planting in Iceland or similar volunteer work to pay my way around a country.
It’s hard to quantify these things and get a conclusive answer on which is better; I think we can leave it at “both are good.”
I wonder why :P
When I was in Iceland, they told me the reason they don't have forests anymore is that the vikings and other later settlers logged it. (Of course, a random horse tour person isn't the best source so I could very well be misinformed.)
Only when they are initially planted and growing is there a net CO2 sequestration going on.
Burning fossil fuels is the problem we need to fix.
the problem with climate change is the wild swings in weather - if you want to stabilize and buffer these swings, you need to maximize biomass. having a mature forest ecosystem acting as a carbon/nitrogen buffer does a lot of good, but in a way that is difficult to measure
I think we get tunnel vision on CO2 ppm because it's a metric with a nice clean causative effect (greenhouse), but more energy on earth is not what's actually causing us grief, we've destroyed most of the mature ecosystems and decimated total biomass, and we are surprised that this causes issues with the total ecosystem because we consider atmospheric problems somehow unrelated to all the living things participating in chemical cycles with that atmosphere. we need more buffer wherever we can get it, and I hate to see someone poo-pooing ecosystem restoration in favor of carbon sequestration.
That initial sequestration can't make up for ongoing use of fossil fuels, sure, but it still has nonzero value.
Can we cut down forests and store them deep in former mines?
Not eating beef / meat / dairy is the single best thing one can do to help.
https://www.beefmagazine.com/beef-quality/update-us-cattle-e...
(More concretely: individuals cycle, while household units generally compost together. A household of 4 produces a nontrivial amount of compostable waste and diverting it can be a significant ecological outcome, especially if it's replacing purchases of topsoil or artificial fertilizer. It also makes taking the trash out more pleasant, since it doesn't spend days rotting indoors before being tossed to the curb.)
Also note that buying a different product in the supermarket is an entirely different order of magnitude than changing your life around so that you can cycle to work without less free time / degrading quality of life. I'd argue there's sense to recommending doing low hanging fruit.
We need institutional solutions; we can't afford to punt climate change to individual choices.
[1]: https://helpmecompost.com/home-composting/implementation/how...
"Carbon footprint" was originally invented by the public relations agency Ogilvy & Mather for BP as a concept to divert attention from industry to individuals.
https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...
That's not to say that public pressure is not a good thing. It is. But the actual causal effect it has for a better future is in the form of creating political sentiment. Individual carbon economy is mostly about promoting a political sentiment via signaling.
But generally it's a fools errand trying to scientifically balance your "carbon footprint" since this was not an engineering concept to start with. If it makes you feel good to plant trees do it! Trees are awesome. Buying less stuff you don't need is also always good I think. For example I use my cell phones until something irrevocably gives up and drive my current car as long as possible (generally making a new car is always more resource consuming than driving the current one I think).
[0] For example Vaclaw Smil "How the world really works" discusses our fossil fuel based economy at length
In German, it's more common to refer to an ecological footprint, its usage which goes back to at least 1992, and it wasn't coined by a PR company, but by very straight laced environmentalists.
I don't know whether BP falsified the evidence here, but everything kinda points towards that it really is the consumers that drive demand.
> generally it's a fools errand trying to scientifically balance your "carbon footprint"
How would you, then, unscientifically solve climate change if we aren't supposed to take individual action to bring our own footprint to net zero, encourage others to do the same, and bring about societal change using market pressure and all that?
> If it makes you feel good to plant trees do it! Trees are awesome.
But if the "you" in this sentence is being made to feel good for the wrong reasons, isn't that dishonest? Shouldn't we be looking at what is actually effective use of your money, and not let people fall for feel-good tree planting only for them to find out ten years down the line that their hard-earned money went into /dev/null and they should have done (and could have been told about) something like meat reduction or solar panels instead?
Here is my reasoning. Say I give enough to plant 10 trees a month. In 10 years that's 1,200 trees. Let's say half of them die, we're left with 600. Assuming a tree absorb 1 ton of CO2 throughout its life, that 600 tons. I live in a place where CO2 emissions per capita are about 6 tons a year (check for yourself here and don't forget to compare with the US https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis... ).
According to this back of the enveloppe calculation after 10 years I would have planted enough trees to offset 100 years of carbon emissions.
In any case, it really puts into perspective how messed up our continued use of fossil fuels is.
That's something of a myth. Most of the deforestation in Ireland occurred long before the plantations (even BCE). While trees were cut for shipbuilding, deforestation was primarily the result of agriculture and a booming population pre-famine.
https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/general-topics/...
Iceland wasn't settled by humans until the Viking age, in the 9th century CE. Are you claiming it was deforested a millennia earlier than that?
Edit: I'm an idiot, I misread your comment. Apologies!
https://www.forestryservices.ie/history-of-forestry-in-irela...
Basically my opinion is that we should be allowed to mess up our own island but another country messing with our island is a crime and infringement of our sovereignty. So yea -- thumbs up to Neolithic farmers trying to make ends meet vs a thumbs down to a global Empire bent on taking over the world through it's military navy.
It’s better to have legitimate complaints when making a criticism of the British empire. There’s plenty of them.
That said, there's a difference between reforesting efforts the countryside and (stupidly) cutting down a couple of trees in your garden. Scotland and Ireland are I think similarly deforested after previously having been nearly covered in it. There are reforestation efforts in Scotland, though I don't think we'll see a huge difference within my lifetime :(
edit: ok it's maybe less negative than I thought, Wikipedia thinks we've jumped from 5% forested to 17% since the ~1950s.
I can't imagine chopping down a lovely conifer. We have a dozen ~20 meter tall trees in a row and our neighbours sounded almost annoyed we didn't chop them down with the rest that we had to fell when building our house. It killed us to lose the ones we did. Mind you we're on 3 acres; we're not shading anyone else.
I have a couple hundred saplings growing, fingers crossed I have a nice starter forest in a decade or so.
EDIT: though the lighting would probably be awesome for TV viewing or gaming… it’s important to remember that if the house is sticks and siding with asphalt covered shingles, there’s an increased maintenance burden and security risk from having a ton of trees close to the house.
https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/general-topics/...
Not only that, they took our young men to fight in their colonial armies; and deracinated the educated to serve as middeling officials in their colonial governments!
Anyway, I'm being ironic, the Irish were part of the colonial project as much as working class factory workers were in Manchester were.
Is that a real concern when it comes to trees?
Hawaii has a huge problem with this, but also California. The eucalyptus trees they imported from Australia have had the terrible affect of making wildfires in California even worse. There's also a horrible negative feedback loop because the Eucalyptus is adapted to recover quickly from such fires.
"It has been estimated that 70% of the energy released through the combustion of vegetation in the Oakland fire was due to eucalyptus.[41] In a National Park Service study, it was found that the fuel load (in tons per acre) of non-native eucalyptus woods is almost three times as great as native oak woodland." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus#Adaptation_to_fire
Fkn hate those trees and the bugs they host!
Native is more about replanting things into a stable ecosystem, versus non native, which can become invasive and detrimental to that ecosystem
Actually maybe I'd call Haida Gwaii the Canadian Hawaii.
- What should you do if you get lost in a forest?
- Stand up! (other version: Just get off your knees!)
Even worse than walking would be driving, and that is also illegal in Iceland.
I'll see myself out...
> BTW what a rare example of a joke that does not offend anyone
I realize that being overly sensitive is an online virtue in teenager websites like Reddit or Instagram. But HN users can be assumed to be adults. No need to point out "look, a joke that _doesn't_ offend!" here.
And risk getting called a ashkenazi?
But yeah, being able to shrug off insults/find insults/jokes funny is something I hold in high regard.
Sadly, too many people take offense on someone elses behalf.
Since I would personally call that a religion and not a race, which is likely some heated discussion hence proper material for humor: do you happen to have a joke covering that aspect?
We probably wouldn't risk joking about your folk.
Could have fooled me.
Thankfully most people are sane.
So important today!!!
From what I have gathered the biggest obstacle to tree regrowth in Iceland are sheep which can roam anywhere in the island for I think 4 months in the year and just eat saplings.
Obviously the sheep farming industry does not want to hear about limiting their herding areas and you can guess the result.
Before that we had visited the redwoods in California and those absolutely dwarfed our trees here in the midwest of US (Iowa specifically) and made us feel like all the trees here were just tiny, but our trip to Iceland and their lack of trees made us feel good about our small trees.
Went to the witchcraft and sorcery museum and the girl who was working the counter spoke perfect English and even sounded American and she said to us "Oh Americans, where ya from?!" and we told her and she goes "Oh cool, I'm American too!" and we followed up "Oh cool where you from?" she said Colorado, then laughed and said nah she's Icelandic but loved pulling that joke on Americans.
The current habit of wild gracing is making reforesting much harder then it needs to be.
I obviously support the replant action efforts, but want to highlight the beauty in the current state as well.
There is in fact a saying: “If you get lost in an Icelandic forest, stand up”.
Then again, life in Iceland was cold, dark and miserable for centuries all the while nature kept trying to kill everyone.
Some interesting things in there beyond the more obvious things like hot springs, peat, and other biomass that Iceland would have. But drift wood being a thing that I did not think off. Of course, there would have been some forests initially and also the ability to import timber and other materials from elsewhere in exchange for some of the exports (fish, whale oil, etc.).
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/drift-wood-in-the-remote...
https://www.darnoldhiking.com/uploads/4/3/1/8/43181693/dsc06...
- Build incredibly insulated turf+stone housing
- Put livestock in the basement
- Body warmth of livestock heats up the house during winter
- The good insulation keeps the home temperature liveable all winter
Rather than relying on the aggresive burning of wood in a fireplace, they relied on the consistent burning of livestock's body temperatures fed by a store of feedstock grown in the prior Summer.
And like others mentioned here, widespread sheep & goat farming can keep the new saplings down.
Not a source, but an interesting story about iron in Iceland: https://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/manufacturing/text...
But in the sagas all the Icelandic outlaws would instead travel overseas (quite literally, since Iceland is surrounded by sea) - which now makes a lot of sense to me knowing that Iceland was already deforested early on, so there wasn't really a lot of forest to go to.
The reason I've heard for this is that most of the country was (and is) forest. Enough forest that you can hide from, and/or ambush, anyone coming to mess with you.
Also, the thralls were mostly taken prisoner in raids abroad, so the local forests were not a factor.
1 kg of dry wood captures 1.65-1.80 kg of CO₂.
Not because the tree is bigger on the inside, but because the oxygen atoms are most of the CO₂ weight.
Are you saying that every single KG of dried wood will have the exact same number of carbon molecules?
70%+ seems a lot; I'm not sure where you got that number from? For example in [1] mentions about 15% in 1086 for England, [2] mentions ~2% 1750 for the Netherlands and ~11% in 1775 for Belgium. Numbers will undoubtable differ for other countries, but 70%+ is really a lot.
Neolithic people already cleared a lot of forest for agriculture in Europe, which happened thousands of years ago. In some countries (such as the Netherlands) forests have actually grown in the last few centuries (from the ~2% in 1750 mentioned before to ~10% today).
Iceland had "only" about 30% forest before settlers arrived.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/jul/27/history-of-en...
[2]: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bos_(begroeiing)#Oppervlakte
Sweden and Finland today have ~70%. 30% is the number for most of Europe today, and it's usually considered low, among the people I know. So it seems that Iceland historically already had very little forestation.
> "In the meantime, Iceland’s forests have begun to produce wood for a small timber market. Forests planted between 1950-1970 are now supplying around 5,000 square metres of wood per year: miniscule compared to industries abroad, but a start. The Icelandic birch, Siberian larch, Sitka spruce, lodgepole pine and balsam poplar are producing quality wood of equal or superior quality to that which Iceland imports from abroad. Yet an overwhelming 80% of the trees felled are burned as fuel in silicon smelting."
Iceland has a silicon production industry, which relies on geothermal electricity interestingly enough. The wood is included to grab the oxygen from silicon dioxide to produce elemental silicon metal (being emitted as carbon dioxide). Overall, if they could eliminate the coal from the mix, this would be a carbon-neutral fossil-fuel free silicon production system:
> "Silicon metal is extracted from quartzite, aided by the addition of wood chip and coal, in electric arc furnaces at temperatures of around 2,000 degrees Celsius. The new plant obtains its key raw material quartzite primarily from PCC’s own quarry in Zagórze, Poland. However, the related logistical costs are more than outweighed by the advantages of electricity procurement. And the dust emissions generated during silicon metal production are almost completely removed from the ambient air by high-performance filter systems installed in the PCC plant. Taken as a whole, therefore, the production process offers exceptional sustainability credentials."
This article says that in all of Iceland there are now 45,000 hectares of forest. So there is 225% more land burning in Siberia this year alone compared to all the forest planted in Iceland.
