In Late March, 2015 it was published that the Earth Is Getting Greener Despite Decades Of Deforestation.

While the news coming out of forests is often dominated by deforestation and habitat loss, research published in Nature Climate Change, shows that the world has actually got greener over the past decade! Wow.

Despite ongoing deforestation in South America and South-east Asia, they found that the decline in these regions has been offset by recovering forests outside the tropics, and new growth in the drier savannas and shrublands of Africa and, of course mates - Australia!!

Now, get this.... Plants absorb around a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

With a greening globe, more plants may mean more absorption of carbon dioxide. If so, this will slow but not stop climate change.

However, questions remain over how long plants can keep pace with our increasing emissions in a warmer climate.

Not only studying Cabron In Plants, scientists have also been studying how plants and vegetation are (faring) by determining the amount of carbon stored in living plant mass (or “biomass”) above the ground.

So they've developed a new technique to map changes in vegetation biomass using satellite measurements of changes in the radio-frequency radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface, ok, that's a technique called passive microwave remote sensing. The radiation varies with temperature, soil moisture, and the shielding of water in vegetation biomass above the ground.

They extracted this vegetation information from several satellites and merged them into one time series covering the last two decades. This allowed them to track global changes in biomass from month to month, and this is something that was not possible before.

For the period 2003-to 2012, they found that the total amount of vegetation above the ground has increased by about 4 billion tonnes of carbon.

So, we're still Losing Rainforests, But we're Gaining Forests elsewhere

They found unexpectedly large vegetation increases in savannas and shrublands of Australia, Africa, and South America. Previous analyses have focused on closed forests and did not measure this increase.

Now... the question we all want to know. Is Australia Getting Greener?

Well, On average, Australia is “greener” today than it was two decades ago, ok. This is despite ongoing land clearing, urbanisation and the recent droughts in some parts of the country.

However,..... the increase in vegetation hasn't been uniform. The largest increases are in northern Australia, with lesser increases, here in S.A. and a small decrease in south-eastern Australia.

These vegetation trends seem to be mainly explained by rainfall patterns... alright, follow me here.... northern Australia has been getting wetter and south-east Australia dryer and this pattern is predicted to continue according to the most recent climate change projections from the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.

Apart from the effect of rainfall patterns, their study also agreed with other studies observing a gradual greening trend for the past two decades, even where there was NO change or even a small decrease in rainfall.

This has been mainly caused by the increasing number of trees and shrubs growing on semi-arid grasslands. These plants are more efficient water users than other plants such as grasses. So.... with the increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions, they are able to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere without using more water.

We all know that the world’s vegetation plays an important part in slowing down climate change. But statistically - about a quarter of all carbon emissions from human activities are removed by vegetation, with the size of the carbon land-sink increasing over time.

However, it remains to be seen how the increased climate variability that accompanies climate change will affect this terrestrial “carbon sink” in future.... This is particularly true for seasonally dry ecosystems that experience fires, such as our Australian bushy areas, where a single fire event can easily remove the carbon stored in plant biomass over many previous years. The future interaction between climate variability, vegetation and fire is difficult to predict and remains the focus of this intense research.

Overall, their study provides more direct evidence of the global increase of vegetation growth and the terrestrial carbon sink than previous studies with unprecedented geographical attribution, and year-to-year changes.

With terrestrial vegetation removing about a quarter of the carbon emissions from human activities and the global oceans removing ANOTHER quarter, this means that half of our CO2 emissions remains in the atmosphere. Therefore, stabilising concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the consequent impact on the climate system will still require large reductions of global fossil fuel emissions.

So... the point? Care for you're environment people, 'coz - WE - EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US, can play an important active role. & I feel that we should all work together in this. I'm doing my bit by spreading the word.

and THAT'S the Green Thumb Segment, here on Reddit. =>