China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990
211 comments
·October 28, 2025hereme888
gchamonlive
Honest question, aren't coral reefs also very sensitive to climate change? How much of that loss is because of regional activities and how much is due to global environmental changes?
aiauthoritydev
India too has been adding more green cover than ever. Higher CO2 in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests. But more important factor is urbanization for India. As people move to cities the need to cut down trees goes down.
profsummergig
India doesn't do it in an organized way though.
You'll read about some 70 year old woman/man in an obscure village who's reforested thousands of acres on their own, or resuscitated a lake (e.g. the lake guy in Bengaluru).
But there's little effort to harness their knowledge in a systematic way, add knowledge from others into the knowledge bank, do peer review, and then systematically dispense the knowledge in the form of a kit to environmentalists and bureaucrats across the country. China did this, and that's why they're so successful.
PeaceTed
Yeah another example of the saying "India is a disappointment to both optimists and pessimists".
torginus
One nice thing about these developing countries is due to the power infrastructure tends to be not very good - which prompts people to take things into their hands and install solar, not to save the planet but to stave off brownouts, and be able to run the AC around the clock to stave off the heat.
For residential, solar + batteries straight up beats legacy infra on cost, and with the upcoming cheap sodium batteries, things are only going to get better.
navigate8310
Doesn't that put pressure on the cities itself especially the peripheral counties to pave way for housing and concrete roads?
roncesvalles
Cities tend to expand up. Almost all buildings in Mumbai that are under 5 stories are targeted for "redevelopment" i.e. a developer buying it out and building something taller in its place.
navigate8310
That is too costly for cities that have cheap and abandoned agricultural land waiting to be deforested and build upon.
devnullbrain
Yes, and it's a good thing.
Either way, you need to fit the needs of the same number of people. If they're in a dense city near everything they need, they use less space.
Policies to limit urban sprawl just an expensive way to create more sprawl elsewhere - and roads to it.
worik
> Yes, and it's a good thing
It is. I have seen the data
But I live in a rural area of New Zealand and I also see how people moving onto farm land greatly increases tree cover (not forrest) and biodiversity, I assume because people plant gardens, and closely husband them
In New Zealand farmers are grossly damaging to the environment. They clear everything and plant mono cultures and treat water as exhaustable and rivers as waste dumps
So yes people in cities is a good thing, but people in rural areas are good, to
mc32
Guess it depends on whether subsistence living is more resource intensive than urban living where on average urbanites own more possessions per capita.
cyberax
> Higher CO2 in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests.
Sigh. No, unfortunately it doesn't. Natural plants are very rarely rate-limited by the CO2 concentration. So forests don't grow faster.
However, higher CO2 does make the forests a bit more drought-resistant.
kulahan
This is opposite to everything I've ever read. A brief "greening" period was expected (and is now nearing its end) as climate change started taking off due specifically to this effect.
Edit: to clarify, I'm saying the greening thing already happened due to increases in CO2 levels (though it's possible this is due to heat and not CO2 itself, I guess?).
deadbabe
So why are the forests growing faster
cyberax
The TLDR is that they aren't. Global warming made some areas more hospitable to forests (warmer, more precipitation) and increased drought resistance counteracts some of the increased aridity in other ares: https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-diox...
gnarlouse
I'm starting to think that we're the baddies.
thesmtsolver
Great quality comment.
We shouldn't consider the fact China did much more deforestation to start with and even after all this reforestation China has lesser forest area than the US despite being larger in size:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577
> The US claims: "China is the world's largest consumer of illegal timber products." > And, according to studies, that is true.
> The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested." And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.
kulahan
Ecologically speaking, the US is an absolute monster of a nightmare. The American carbon footprint is incredible.
munk-a
The US was positioned to leverage technological and economic advantages to embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure. It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic.
votepaunchy
> embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure
Our children’s generation will never forgive us for abandoning nuclear energy abundance. Truly a crime against humanity.
potato3732842
> It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic.
It was the entirely predictable result of the policies we adopted. You don't get to be sloppy and shortsighted and then sail off into the sunset without consequences.
Kicking the industrial layers of the economic pyramid overseas and telling people to learn to code is what you do when you want a quick win and don't care if people will rightly hate you in a couple decades (IMO it's a miracle we're discussing this now and not in 2002).
Behaving that way isn't socially/politically sustainable and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
jaza
I would have thought that, in saying "we", OP was referring to all of humanity, rather than just the US and/or the Western world.
porknaut
It doesn't even come close to China. So if we're a nightmarish monster, I would hate to think what that makes China.
tzs
China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting.
Both are over their fair share, but the US is over by a larger factor so is farther behind on getting to where they need to be.
(This is not taking into account trade. Divvying up the world emissions budget by population gives the fair amount for each country if there is no trade. If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better).
2muchcoffeeman
China is also deploying a ton a renewables though. Its the worlds leading producer of renewables. It’s a mistake to think they won’t ween off carbon where they can. The US has a president that said “drill baby drill”.
IAmGraydon
It's funny this myth persists, primarily in conservative circles, it seems. We are far worse per capita than China. In 2023, the US emitted 13.83 tons of carbon per capita. In that same year, China emitted 9.24 tons per capita. There are few countries that are worse than us - that list includes Russia and Saudi Arabia.
manoDev
Not per capita.
ebbi
Not intending to make this political, but it's a relevant point to consider: we should also take into account the carbon footprint of all the bombs that were dropped by America and its proxies into the equation as well.
The environmental impact from these would be immense, I'd imagine.
JBiserkov
I mean, just the nukes alone are incomprehensible, adding all the conventional munitions ... I'm out of words.
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
1 second = 1 month
cman1444
...do nuclear bombs release significant amounts of CO2? I didn't think they did.
switchbak
Ahem: "China consumes over half of the world’s coal and contributes more than 20% of global CO2 emissions from coal combustion."
But trees are nice.
Source: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.918
lvturner
Your point reads strangely, it's almost like saying "Why even bother when CO2 emissions are so high" - surely ANYTHING that they are doing to turn that around should be celebrated and encouraged rather than saying "Yeah but..." - Rome wasn't built in a day and all.
Waterluvian
It’s becoming very hard to see China as the adversary and not the U.S. There isn’t even a pretend moral high ground anymore.
porknaut
What does your comment have to do with ecology? Just because China plants trees (news flash, so does the US) doesn't erase the fact they are far and away the biggest emitter of carbon emissions and have high levels of pollution.
Glad they are trying to do good things though.
Hikikomori
US is far higher per capita and doing nothing about it.
mrits
I could see how you would come to that conclusion if your knowledge of China started 5 minutes ago
thegreatpeter
Texas has the most wind farms & largest solar arrays in all of the US
mc32
During the same period the US also added 18MM acres and so has Canada, but additionally Russia, India and Europe have also net added forest… so the “baddies” are still Brazil, Indonesia and the democratic Republic of the Congo.
TheRealNGenius
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null
marricks
This and Bill Gates saying...
> “the doomsday outlook [on climate change] is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
I guess it's cool there's something to be hopeful about, westerner's just seemed excited to make money off of melting ice in Greenland.
9dev
Bill Gates is fundamentally anthrophilic, so his concern is above all human suffering. I think that’s a valid viewpoint, but also shortsighted; keeping this planet habitable will require tough decisions and sacrifices, and should stay the utmost priority, out of sheer necessity.
conception
Anthropophilic perhaps…
telchior
The population as a whole has a rapidly dwindling appetite for tech billionaires trying to impose "tough decisions and sacrifices" on everyone else, so Bill's probably in the right lane. He has already been the target of a vast array of conspiracy theories.
hooverd
ah, the classic "you are a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
null
greekrich92
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zahlman
> Since 1990 ... surpassed by China, which managed to add a staggering 173 million acres....
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest
Where did the rest come from?
lovegrenoble
Canada has added 20 million acres,
India 22 million acres,
Russia 52 million acres - an area about the size of Kansas.
softwaredoug
The US reforested significantly in the twentieth century as well, which helped keep some of the US cooler than it should have been relative to the climate change norm.
https://news.agu.org/press-release/a-century-of-reforestatio...
teleforce
Thanks for the info.
Honest questions how much forest the US and UK added since they are probably the loudest in the issue of deforestration?
867-5309
Texas is ~172 million acres
TiredOfLife
> Russia 52 million acres
Does that include the forests russia has burned down in Ukraine?
jillesvangurp
I've been binging a lot of videos on things like rewilding and other approaches that can be used to restore landscapes. The Chinese have successfully executed a number of large scale projects over the decades. They started this early. Where other countries talked about doing things, the Chinese went ahead and did those things.
One of their projects is allowing them to undertake infrastructure projects in the desert. They simply stick bales of straw into ditches to stop soil being blown away by wind. The straw traps soil, water, and breaks down over a few years allowing plants to take hold. It's a simple approach that works. Very pramatic, dig a ditch, stick in some straw. Done. Repeat.
Outside of China, the green wall in Africa is a very pragmatic approach that involves digging a lot of half moon shaped ditches to trap rain water. Simple and effective.
Other approaches involve using fences to stop sheep and other grazers from preventing anything vaguely green tinted shoots from being eaten and giving them a chance to actually turn into trees.
What I like about these approaches is that some relatively simple measures can have big effects. People spend a lot of time hand wringing over seemingly insurmountable problems. The Chinese are showing that in addition to the power to destroy landscapes, we also have the power to remake them. It works. They aren't tree huggers. Better landscapes also mean local economies benefit. Deserts don't feed people. Water retention means agriculture gets a second chance.
What I admire in the Chinese is the pragmatic can do attitude. Their motivations are of course self serving. They value having clean air in their cities, clean drinking water, and a landscape that can support agriculture and infrastructure. And in the end that's the best kind of motivation you can get. It's something worth copying. Whenever economy, science, and environment align, everybody wins.
A lot of areas in the rest of the world that are subject to desertification, pollution, etc. are fixable. And there's value in fixing them that needs more attention. I don't see this as a green/left topic. If you exist on this planet, why wouldn't you want something to be done to clean up the mess we've all created in the last centuries? Breaking out this topic from the usual left/right day to day politics is key. The rest is just work. The Chinese put the rest of us to shame with hard work.
profsummergig
Do you know why the mounds with half-moon shapes? Why is it more effective than simply digging a circular hole in the ground?
jillesvangurp
The idea is that rain flows downhill, you dig the half moon shape to capture the water on the end without a ditch and then it sinks into the ditch instead of flowing unobstructed to the river and taking all soil with it.
It's an ancient practice that was forgotten and rediscovered. The beauty of this approach is that it shows results within a few short years. Basically in Africa if there's water, nature shows up and consumes it. So you get lush growth and rapid soil restoration. Trees, vegetables, etc. on what was a heavily eroded flood plain before.
It's easy to explain, the locals get why it works. And they get a very fast response from nature and all the produce and riches that come with that. And all they need is shovels and some elbow grease.
nkmnz
Same effect for half the work. Look up the videos on youtube, it's manual labor on very hard ground.
0cf8612b2e1e
Why is it manual? If I had a mission to plant millions of trees, I am going to invest in a ditch witch.
null
seb1204
Any YouTube playlist that you can share?
jillesvangurp
Just search for things like "green wall", "china straw landscape", etc.
A few good ones that I watched:
- Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBdIG--b58
- China Buried Tons of Dead Plants Under the Desert Sand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev8DsPH_82Y
- Green Gold: Regreening the Desert | John D. Liu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3nR3G9jboc
There are way more. One channel that I might call https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth. They basically use donations to take on projects to do smalls scale nature restoration. I am actually considering making a donation to them because I like what they do. There are more examples of such channels.
Not everything on this front is without controversy of course and I'm not blind to that. But I like the positive, constructive nature of these approaches. Just the simple notion that it's fixable with a bit of cleverness and lots of hard work. China is of course an autocracy that you can criticize for a lot of things. But they are doing a few things right as well. And it's worth calling that out and learning from them.
aarondf
This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qwshdtijFY and his whole channel are a great binge for this topic.
No nonsense, an actual practitioner, and not very "YouTubey"
nextworddev
Since when is HN overrun by 50 cent army?
maerF0x0
My immediate thought, yeah isnt that because they don't really naturally have the kinds of softwoods forests good for making boards and paper? And until more recently they were taking recycled paper/fiber from america in empty shipping containers returning.
The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
dj_gitmo
> The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
I'm not sure it's environmentalism. It's efficiency. From the article.
> In richer countries, where farming has become more efficient, deforestation has slowed or even reversed
You simply don't need as many people living in villages, farming marginal land. New England re-forested because the land was never that good for farming, and it made a lot more sense to work in factories.
smallnix
At least some projects run longer I understand: > Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees
vondur
I’d heard that project wasn’t going so well. The trees weren’t really suited to the areas where they were planted, and many died off. I suppose even if only a small percentage survive, it’s still better than desert.
FooBarWidget
They had setbacks for sure, but they learned from them and continuously adjusted their methods.
xhkkffbf
I've seen some neat videos on YouTube that sound impressive. Are they impressive in real life? Anyone have any personal experience?
conductr
> as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
Thus far, getting rich has been dirty business. This is what leads people to care more so than them being able to afford to care. Their richness is a side effect of their pollution, thus, caring is a side effect of richness but that's not the root cause. Pollution -> Money -> Caring. If you removed the money, people still care they just can't afford to do anything about it.
I'm not familiar with Pinker or this theory, just poking at it :)
legitster
> Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
I think in this case it's more of a correlating factor. The countries struggling with deforestation have very little state capacity to enforce property rights or any sort of environmental regulations. Whereas in the developed world it's much easier to stop illegal logging or homesteading.
munk-a
I agree and would also add that food security is also a massive factor. With a high food insecurity clamping down on illegal expansion of farmland is politically toxic - but as land use efficiency rises and cities grow conservationalism becomes a much more important agenda to back.
People like nature - all things held equal we want to live in a beautiful natural world... but if that world comes at the cost of having food on the table. Whether that inefficiency is technologically, environmentally (e.g. New England's poor soil) or conflict driven doesn't significantly change public opinion.
IncreasePosts
China is very large, has 90% of the population living on 40% of the land in the southern and eastern portion of the country, and some massive deserts that they don't want to expand. This leaves a lot of room for tree planting programs.
legitster
It's really hard to understate how deforestation ravaged China - their forestry cover declined by almost half during The Great Leap Forward as the CCCP at the time pushed hard to exploit the land. As a result, there were severe and noticeable problems with flooding and desertification. So starting in the 70s they invested heavily in the "Three-North Shelter Forest Program" (aka the Great Green Wall). Although, probably more importantly, economic liberalization meant farming became more efficient and people could move towards cities and free up the land again.
I think more fascinating has been Russia's surge in forestry growth, also very notable in the report. Unlike China their forests have expanded almost completely accidentally. Communist-era collective farmlands have slowly been getting abandoned. Their frontier has been shrinking and the forests have crept in, tree growth being aided by longer growing period and thawing permafrost.
RobotToaster
China was already extensively deforested in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
holoduke
And Europe in the golden era. A squirrel could jump tree to tree from north Scotland al the way to the south. Timber, grazing, charcoal are the prime reasons why everything is gone
ivan_gammel
According to WWF, there was some targeted effort on reforestation and sustainable forest management in Russia, which they claim to have assisted.
mistrial9
as an American that was my understanding also.. small nit (understate deforestation) -> (overstate deforestation).. the phrase means "even if I talked for ten minutes with all the emphasis I can find, it would not be enough to show it.. you cannot OVERstate how serious the impact was..
AuthAuth
This sounds big but its less than the bare minimum required. Their coal emissions are insane. In my opinion its all anyone should be talking about when it comes to climate change.
nitwit005
The project wasn't started as a global warming fix. As the article notes, it was about preventing desertification:
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest, according to U.N. figures, much of it added to contain the spread of deserts. Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees around the Taklamakan Desert in the west. Work continues on a belt of trees around the massive Gobi Desert in the north.
lbrito
Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years.
Thanks.
jacobolus
Chinese CO₂ emissions per capita are only about 60% as much as the USA, but in the past 25 years US per capita emissions have dropped by about a third and Chinese emissions per capita have almost tripled and are still rising rapidly. Considering that China is about 4 times as populous as the US, this is a huge problem for the world. (US emissions are also a huge problem; we all need for them to decrease very quickly.)
hmm37
Is the per capita still rising rapidly? China's CO2 growth levels have already started leveling off, and actually showed a slight decline as of late.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...
cma
China was exiting poverty and heavily industrializing during that period, along with building up massive amounts of infrastructure that could save some emissions over time, though of course also things like coal plants are included in the infrastructure numbers. But if we look at absolute instead of per-capita for some odd reason, an aspect to also look at is that a lot more of those CO2 emissions are from China manufacturing for the US and the world than vice versa.
If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so, post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to geographical luck.
There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main driver of energy consumption growth going forward.
Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.
whoevercares
China has been a developing country for most the time of the past 25 years. It is indeed a huge problem if it is still rising rapidly. But it is also not fair to limit China’s per capita growth for most of the past two decades
vasco
If they are still at 60% of USA unless your opinion is that Chinese people don't deserve air conditioning as much as Americans, you don't really have a point.
throwawaymaths
The earth doesn't give a shit about per capita, and us and eu are net reducing CO2 emissions since 2014 (even during trump I)
8ytecoder
US: 335M / 5,000M ton / 15 ton
Indonesia: 275M / 650M ton / 2.3 ton
Pakistan: 240M / 225M ton / 1 ton
Nigeria: 220M / 110M ton / 0.5 ton
Brazil: 215M / 475M ton / 2.2 ton
I can go on and on about the countries that are emitting less than the US. People and animals live in areas that are liveable. So countries near the equator and fertile countries will always be more populous. So how else do you propose we compare countries? Which are themselves mostly arbitrary lines as far as the earth is concerned - so why chunk by countries? It has to be per person right?
malshe
I am with you on this one. I have seen people making similar arguments about plastic dumped in the oceans where at least until about a decade ago China was well ahead of every nation. The oceans don't care about the per capita plastic polluting them.
amalcon
The earth also doesn't care about national borders, so why are national numbers more useful in this regard?
mtmickush
The earth isn't a person. I think it seems valid to consider the harm and or benefits being caused on a per person basis. Why should an individual in the US be allowed to release more CO2 emissions than an individual in China?
AuthAuth
I couldnt care less what their per captia emissions are they have 1.5b people. Accumulated is about the same as the EU and will very soon overtake the US.
kvirani
Great question. Let's indeed make it a point of discussion then. I'd like to know too.
whoevercares
It is 8.89 China vs 14 according to https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
mulmen
Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact. Neither are relative emissions between countries. This is a global issue.
vanviegen
No, but if some people are outputting way more CO2 than others, these are the ones we should be focussing on first.
the-smug-one
Per capita emissions are relevant, because it shows how much each separate country needs to improve in a relative manner. Absolute emissions doesn't matter to what each state needs to do.
umanwizard
Per capita emissions are relevant in the sense that if China broke into ten separate countries tomorrow, with each new country maintaining their current level of emissions, the effect on the planet would be the same even though an entity called “China” is no longer at the top of the leaderboard.
There is some per capita carbon emissions budget such that if each human on earth stayed within that budget, climate change could be mitigated[0]. The average Chinese person exceeds that budget, but does so by significantly less than the average American. So the average American is more at fault for climate change than the average Chinese person is.
Of course, your second claim, that this is a global issue, is correct. But if we solved the global issue in a fair way, China would still emit a few times more CO2 than the US.
0: “Mitigated” rather than totally solved, because to go back to pre-industrial temperatures the budget would have to be negative. But let’s say we’re talking about staying within 2C or some similar goal.
vkou
> Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact
They aren't relevant to the climate, but they are relevant to how much energy and wealth you allow each person to have.
Does a person in China deserve to have less energy or wealth than a person in America?
fcdssssx
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voxelghost
Well they're releasing 9.2ton CO2 per Capita, the US is releasing 13.5ton CO2 per Capita. And this while the US and the rest of the world is doing all of their manufacturing in China.
GenerocUsername
Maybe the rest of the world should stop doing their manufacturing in china.
miroljub
It's called China, not china.
hammock
Not counting the gobi desert , China is only 5x the size of Texas so it’s nothing to sneeze at
geysersam
This is propaganda. It's impossible to take this comment in good faith
dumbledoren
Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom they are doing manufacturing.
benjiro
> Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom they are doing manufacturing.
Spoken like somebody that never stept a foot in China.
Sure, manufacturing for the West is part of it, but up to a few years ago, entering Beijing alone resulted in your naval cavities burning, the moment the airplane door opened.
Because of the usage from coal in households. It was only until a few years ago, that they banned the usage of wood/coal around the city. Outside the city, its coal everywhere for the normal class people who own their (country)house. Near other large cities its still very coal centric in the winter.
And the heating (communal for apartments) is mostly coal and while the coal may burn a bit more clean, and there is some filtration going on, its not a ton. So while open coal burning was reduced directly in the cities like Beijing, they simply moved a lot of it outside the 6th ring.
All those EV's ... great, no more gasoline/oil usage but ... wait, where does a lot of the electricity come from? Oeps...
But wait, all that crypto mining, where do you think that electricity comes from?
And now AI...
And the consumer goods.
Your statement ignore a large part of the coal consumption in the country.
quacked
The global economy is so China-dependent it doesn't even make sense to talk about an individual country's emissions profile unless we look at their imports.
throwawaymaths
There are import corrected CO2 emissions data you can check if you care. Tl;Dr it's not as big as you think it is.
throwawaymaths
You should check the stats on that, it is not the case.
erikpukinskis
“Their” coal emissions
Mistletoe
Aren’t they bringing on incredible amounts of solar we could only dream about?
Edit: for the downvoters
munk-a
And nuclear power - they have a large carbon deficit to make up so you shouldn't think of them as a green economy by any measure but... I think their strongest advantage is that there is a strong environmental pressure within the country and (while industrialists will be industrialists) there is no faction or movement within China that is dedicated to an anti-environmental agenda.
There's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of friction, corruption and economic pressures constraining that work but there seems to be a genuine desire to do that work.
Mistletoe
I wonder what kind of forest China is making? I was watching a really fascinating PBS documentary on Kanopy and it was talking about a lot of the planting efforts haven't been very good worldwide because planting a monoculture of trees doesn't do much and an old forest with tons of diversity stores twice as much carbon or more, which I thought was neat. So protecting existing forests is much better from a climate change standpoint. But either way, planting trees is better than nothing.
kulahan
They're building an insane amount of nuclear. It's the only thing with a hope in a country where a "small" city has like 6 million people.
pinkgolem
Are they?
They build 10x more solar power (total numbers compared, in percentages solar nearly tripled since 2021, nuclear had a 10% increase)
That seems more like a modest increase.
Honestly solar seems to have an exponential growth, nuclear linear at best.
Numbers from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
abhaynayar
How many football fields is that though?
zahlman
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i2d=true&i=Divide%5Barea+...
About 130 million.
Wise to use forests to contain deserts. Problem is that China still plays a big role in importing deforestation-linked commodities and fund overseas projects that exacerbate global loses. There are low tree survival rates and falsified coverage, like the Three-North Shelterbelt program which is plagued by inefficiencies over its 40 years of operation.
It's also hard to balance afforestation without causing scarcity of water and displacement of native forest habitats. For example, instances where shrubs are misclassified as forests inflate the report figures. China seems to be the global leader in biodiversity loss, with about 80% of its coral reefs and 73% of its mangroves gone since 1950. Everyone knows their abusive fishing practices, and the millions of tons of plastic pollution into the ocean every year.
So, keep up the good environmental efforts, China, and hope you do even better.