{"id":309394,"date":"2019-02-15T18:14:13","date_gmt":"2019-02-15T18:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=309394"},"modified":"2019-02-15T18:14:13","modified_gmt":"2019-02-15T18:14:13","slug":"world-is-a-bit-greener-place-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/world-is-a-bit-greener-place-now\/","title":{"rendered":"World is a bit greener place now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The world is a greener place than it was 20 years ago. And, according to a latest report, India and China are leading the global greening effort from the front. The development may sound contrary to the general perception worldwide but the NASA study based on data received and analysed from its satellite support it. \u201cChina and India account for one-third of the greening but contain only 9 per cent of the planet\u2019s land area covered in vegetation,\u201d said Chi Chen of Boston University, lead author of the study. \u201cThat is a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from over exploitation,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

The study published on February 11, in the journal Nature Sustainability said that recent satellite data (2000 2017) reveal a greening pattern that is strikingly prominent in China and India and overlaps with croplands world-wide. China, according to the report, alone accounts for 25 per cent of the global net increase in leaf area with only 6.6 per cent of global vegetated area. The greening in China is from forests (42 per cent) and croplands (32 per cent), but in India it is mostly from croplands (82 percent) with minor contribution from forests (4.4 per cent), the NASA study said.<\/span><\/p>\n

China is engineering ambitious programmes to conserve and expand forests with the goal of mitigating land degradation, air pollution and climate change. Food production in China and India has increased by over 35 per cent since 2000 mostly owing to an increase in harvested area through multiple cropping facilitated by fertiliser use and surface- and\/or groundwater irrigation.<\/span><\/p>\n

When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center and a co-author of the study. This study was made possible thanks to a two-decade-long data record from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA\u2019s Terra and Aqua satellites. Now with the MODIS data, we see that humans are also contributing, she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Observing that once people realise there is a problem, they tend to fix it, Nemani said in the 1970s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss was not good. In the 1990s, people realized it, and today things have improved. Humans are incredibly resilient. That\u2019s what we see in the satellite data, she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

letters@tehelka.com<\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The world is a greener place than it was 20 years ago. And, according to a latest report, India and China are leading the global greening effort from the front. The development may sound contrary to the general perception worldwide but the NASA study based on data received and analysed from its satellite support it. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":309418,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,2205],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309429,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309394\/revisions\/309429"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media\/309418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}