Climate Week: Post 3

            While choosing to focus on media and its effects on climate change for my larger project, another aspect of climate change I am very passionate about is environmental injustice. So, I couldn’t help but smile when I heard about AFR 100 and its launch at COP 21.

              AFR 100 stands for African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative and hopes to restore approximately 100 million hectares or 386,000 square miles of forest by 2030. This would be an attempt at restoring the over 700 million hectares of land in Africa that has been degraded. The initiative corresponds with the Bonn Challenge, which aims to restore 150 million hectares around the world by 2020, and the New York Declaration on Forests, which aims to restore 350 million hectares by 2030.

The World Resources Institute says that the benefits can be as great as follows:

·      “Boost landscape productivity”

·      “Improve food and water security”

·      “Increase climate change resilience”

·      “Reduce disaster risk”

·      “Combat desertification”

·      “Conserve biodiversity”

These would be tremendous if the project is able to rise above the challenge

that is presented. Funds and resources may be difficult to achieve but if the pledges follow through we are on a good start.

            One primary problem with this initiative however is that carbon is just temporarily stored within the trees. Once they die, the carbon they took out of the air will be released again. The benefit of this plan though is that although temporary, it could give us extra time to figure out a longer term solution.