The Scottish Mail on Sunday

A Trillion Trees

Fred Pearce Granta £20 ★★★★★

- Shaoni Bhattachar­ya

Plant a tree and save the planet – it’s simple, right? Yes, we need to look after our forests, but the way we do this isn’t quite as straightfo­rward as simply sowing saplings to replace trees we’ve chopped down – or ‘greening’ areas that weren’t green in the first place.

Trees aren’t just our planet’s lungs, giving us oxygen to breathe while absorbing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide – they are also Earth’s beating heart, argue some scientists. They take in water and give it out through transpirat­ion, and this can drive global water and wind patterns, says Fred Pearce. So much so that the watery breath of the Amazon rainforest can provide the rainfall needs of megacity São Paulo, thousands of kilometres away, via a ‘flying river’.

Pearce is a veteran environmen­t journalist (I worked with him years ago on New Scientist) and brings decades of on-the-ground reporting to this erudite and authoritat­ive book.

He takes the reader deep into the world’s forests and finds the real story.

Not the one sold to us by government­s, power companies or even some oldschool conservati­onists.

A Trillion Trees tells us how, instead, local farmers can help trees and ecosystems to thrive, how some carbonsavi­ng power projects are anything but, and how indigenous forest-dwellers – long derided by some as harming forests – are in fact best at safeguardi­ng them.

Even mass-planting trees, which may seem environmen­tally beneficial, may not be helpful if done with little scientific analysis. An example is China’s ‘Grain for Green’ tree-planting policy, which has seen millions of trees planted on the slopes of the Yellow River, increasing tree cover but reducing local water availabili­ty.

Many farmers whose land was used have subsequent­ly cleared nearby natural forests for their livelihood­s.

This book may appeal also to the travel-hungry and adventurou­s. It’s proper gumshoe journalism – we start in the cloud forests of Ecuador, climb 1,500 steps up an observatio­n tower above the forest

canopy in the Amazon, visit mangroves in Tanzania and attend a court hearing of three men charged with murdering an activist who attempted to stop rainforest­s being turned to palm oil plantation­s in Sarawak.

Despite all the destructio­n, Pearce is ultimately optimistic. Left alone, trees grow back on plundered lands. As he says: ‘Give them a chance and many forests can return.’

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