It’s now over 50 years since the world was first warned that resources were being used at an unsustainable rate. It has now been estimated that almost one quarter to one third of the world’s land is degraded to some extent.

Through the cacophony of the UN’s global climate talks, an Australian farmer is quietly spreading his plan to reforest the world.

Hundreds of rows of giant bamboo grow about an hour outside of Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. It’s an unexpected sight—Malawi has lost nearly 10 percent of its forests since 2001, and bamboo isn’t even native to the country. But that’s exactly the reason Grant Blumrick knew he had to start the AfriBam giant bamboo farm.

In the 2015 Paris climate agreement, 195 nations committed to limit global warming to two degrees above pre-industrial levels. But some, like Eelco Rohling, professor of ocean and climate change at the Australian National University’s research school of earth sciences, now argue that this target cannot be achieved unless ways to remove huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are found, and emissions are slashed.

I was shocked to read about the sudden closure of a well-known luxury safari operation in the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania. My dismay was not only because I personally know the owners of this wonderful operation and know what a terrible blow this must be to them.

A black beetle the size of a sesame seed is killing South Africa’s trees, and no one knows how to stop it. After arriving from Southeast Asia about four years ago, the polyphagous shot-hole borer has spread a thousand miles across South Africa, from the eastern city of Pietermaritzburg, where it was discovered in 2017, to indigenous forests on the west coast near Cape Town. An unwelcome side effect of globalization, the pest is believed to have arrived along with wood pellets on a ship.

If a tree falls in the forest, will another replace it?

Of the roughly 3 million square kilometers of forest lost worldwide from 2001 to 2015, a new analysis suggests that 27 percent of that loss was permanent — the result of land being converted for industrial agriculture to meet global demand for products such as soy, timber, beef and palm oil.

On this new global map, huge swaths of land are dotted in green pixels. These are the areas that could potentially be recovered with forests that have disappeared, according to a new study—and in total, could help capture as much as two-thirds of the carbon that humans have pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution.

The land to the north of the village of Foros de Vale Figueira in southern Portugal has been owned and farmed through the centuries by Romans, Moors, Christians, capitalists, far rightists, even the military. It has been part of a private fiefdom, worked by slaves as well as communists.

Tree planting has been widely promoted as a solution to climate change, because plants absorb the climate-warming gases from Earth’s atmosphere as they grow.

There are two important answers to the question “why do we need more trees in farmland?” One is global and one is local.

Trees’ services to this planet range from carbon storage and soil conservation to water cycle regulation. They support natural and human food systems and provide homes for countless species – including us, through building materials.

In recent years, climate change has loomed like a dark specter over the globe, contributing to everything from gentrification in Miami to refugees fleeing drought and crop shortages in Guatemala.

For thousands of years, trees and humans have maintained an intimate connection. It’s therefore not surprising that many tree species were moved around the world, following the footprints of human civilisation.

The amount of material consumed by humanity has passed 100bn tonnes every year, a report has revealed, but the proportion being recycled is falling.

To have a chance of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, society needs to reach net-zero emissions by 2050—meaning that if we can’t transition to an emissions-free economy by that time, we’ll need to find ways to remove everything we’re still pumping into the atmosphere.

More than two years have passed since the detection of what is arguably the most damaging tree pest ever to arrive in South Africa: the polyphagous shot hole borer (Euwallacea fornicatus). The beetle kills trees and there are no proven remedies.

What do you need to live? What are the absolute essentials? As much as you might protest, you don’t need your iPhone, nor super-fast fibre-optic broadband, even if the flickering of router lights sends you into a frenzied withdrawal. You can drop the sneaky Friday night beer or the Monday morning coffee. Put simply; the niceties are not necessary.

Across the globe, tree cover loss hit record highs from 2016-2018, with roughly the size of a soccer field lost each second. In 2018 alone, the area of tree cover loss was larger than the UK.

“Elephant damage!” is now a common phrase in reaction to the sight of fallen trees, and landscapes bereft of trees. The apparent loss of large savanna trees such as marula and knobthorn in Africa’s protected areas is often blamed on elephants, and this perceived direct link between elephants and treefall drives many conservation authorities and strategies to focus on managing elephant numbers to ‘save’ trees.