Climate Basics Podcast (Ep 11) - Africa's Great Green Wall
- Greg
- Jan 3
- 33 min read
Updated: Jan 20
Other Countries:
China's reforestation initiative:
China planted 78 billion new trees—and seriously messed up its water cycle
Xi Focus: Planting trees to fortify China's 'green assets' - Chinadaily.com.cn
Carbon sequestration potential of tree planting in China | Nature Communications
China's forest coverage surpasses 25%, leading global green expansion - CGTN
China Planted 78 Billion New Trees—and Messed Up Its Water Cycle
Forty years of tree-planting in China: successes and failures | Climate-Diplomacy
Episode 11, Climate Basics Podcast
Transcript of Ep 11:
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[Music] Welcome to Climate Basics, a podcast about the global energy transition and
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the challenges countries face, presented in an optimistic and realistic light.
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Here are your hosts, Tai and Greg. And please
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Hi, Ty. Hey, how's it going Greg? Good. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Yeah. 2026. Let's see
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what this one brings us. Yeah. And uh I apologize if I cough a
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little bit. I'll try not to, but um yeah, it's in Toronto. I think we are full-fledged into this um yearly battle
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with the flu and all that sort of nonsense. So yeah. Um but I trust that you are healthy, everybody that you know
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as well, and you're looking forward to another fabulous year of uh renewable energy taking over uh taking over the
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world. Yeah, hopefully. Uh not everyone is healthy. There's actually colds and stuff going around here. uh been eating
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a lot of ginger and garlic to try to fight it off this week. Right. Nature's medicine.
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Nature's medicine. Yeah. All those spices are actually medicines. That's why they're spices. Right. Okay. Well, so we have an
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interesting topic uh this week. We're going to talk about um the Africa Great Green Wall, which is a um vegetation
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slash trying to plant trees and other vegetation in order to stop the expansion of the desert in Africa and
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talk about that initiative. But before we get started, um I'd like to I' I'd
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like for us to talk about good news. And in term Yeah. And in terms of this, I wanted also just to introduce the
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listeners the fact that we actually have a theme song for the good news. So what the segment gets its own theme
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song. We don't even have a theme song. Oh, that's great. There's this great company that develops
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uh excellent um children themed u videos um that has a climate emphasis. And so I
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happened upon um one of their videos, heard this song, thought, "Hey, this is perfect." And they've given us
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permission to use it. They're a great company. People should check them out, particularly if you school age kids. So my kids are in high school and
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university, so I tried to sit them down and get them to listen to it, and that didn't quite work out well. But, you know, if it was a decade earlier, they
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would have just absolutely loved it. So I I I encourage people to go check it out. And here's the theme.
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powering the world for you and me. Clean and green is the way. Let's save our
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earth every day. And so, yeah, that sounded beautiful, right? And so, in terms of this week's
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good news, um, yeah, Ty, do you mind if I go first and just introduce? Go for it. Yeah.
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Okay. I'm working off a BBC article and they were talking about good news, uh, to celebrate some developments in 2025.
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And one of the stories that really hit me was that China, of course, they are the renewable energy leader of the
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world, and that's fantastic, but they're actually trying to lean into their offshore wind turbines being resistant
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to typhoons because, as people probably know, um there are certain areas in uh
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in China and Southeast Asia or that have typhoons, which are hurricanes
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essentially. They're just called typhoons. They have that annually. So, it's a regular thing. It's very similar to Florida. Florida gets hit with
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hurricanes every year. It's pretty reliable. You don't know exactly when they're coming, but when they do come, you have to be careful. So, China in
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certain parts of their their coastal regions um by Hong Kong, they have typhoons as well. And so, as do other
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countries, but China has installed wind turbines there um and quite a bit
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because for the nine months of the year that they don't have typhoons, it's just a very productive area to to to get free
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electricity. that is use your wind turbines and just generate a lot of electricity for for the good of your
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people. And then they have to deal with the fact that during that 3-month period, just like in Florida, you have
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patchy weather. So you have stronger winds and then of course occasionally you'll have the typhoon or hurricane
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equivalent developing. And so what do you do? So what China has decided to do is they've decided to lean into it. So
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they they have experienced destruction as you might imagine. If if Florida, the coast of Florida was dotted with wind
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turbines, which is what's happening in China in Guangdang, um that area, and
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during the hurricane season in Florida, obviously you would experience um loss and damage to those turbines. And each
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turbine cost about $3 million, if not more, to to install. So that's a lot of money. And so what China has done
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recently, they lost 25 turbines in a a typhoon um period. So what they're doing
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is they're reinstalling and installing more. and they're trying to make these wind turbines typhoon proof that is
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available to survive in a typhoon and generate even generate electricity up to
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you know a certain certain number of speed. Um so anyways the the article said that one of the Chinese engineers
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that they were interviewing was saying well you know it's very productive to keep the turbines wind turbines running
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even when the winds start to go you know to the 90 km per hour range 100 km an
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hour range 110 km uh per hour range because he was saying you know you can
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produce a lot of energy during that those storms. So it's I I find that very interesting. Not only are they putting
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in the time and the money and the effort to install in these areas which are typhoon or hurricane hit, but they're
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also making it uh so that they're looking making it trying to make it work. One interesting engineering um
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sort of uh comment that they made in the article was the fact that I guess they're tethering it uh or they're
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installing securing those wind turbines in typhoon prone areas in a way where
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the the wind turbine can actually turn a little bit into the wind that's actually oncoming. And by turning into it, then
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they can suffer perhaps less damage and and also not be completely tethered in the traditional way. So that they're
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using uh sort of the ropes and the pulleys. I don't know whether or not you're familiar with that, whether or not you've got any comments about that, but I find that just fascinating.
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Well, a little bit. I'm not an expert on wind or offshore installation, but it makes sense that when you have really
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high wind speeds, wind speeds over 100 miles an hour or over 160 km an hour,
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uh, things can get moved around. and the traditional types of just one vertical pole going up the size of a building and
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then having three big blades. It works for a range of speeds, but it gets a
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little bit less resilient against these in really really powerful gusts. And in those cases, uh there's actually several
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engineering choices that you can make to have a more resilient structure. One thing is that normally you have the
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turbine set with the blades in front of it and the wind pushing against this way. And when you have that, yeah, it it
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works great. Catches a lot of energy, but it also catches a lot of that energy. So with these ones that you're talking about off the coast of China,
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they've actually reversed that. So as the wind is going this way, you have first the turbine and then the blades. So the whole thing is, as you said,
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leaning leaning with the wind, which is uh a lot better than trying to work against that amount of just physical
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force. And yeah, you're right. You can collect a lot of energy like that if everything doesn't get destroyed. But
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yeah, we're we're now uh this isn't experimental or prototype. This is already in the water and they've already
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I believe some of these have already withtood winds of over 100 miles an hour in function and continue to generate
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energy which is fantastic because right like you said this is the same thing in
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Florida and it's for the same reasons. The same heat that happens in the center of the Atlantic Ocean and then that heat
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becomes kinetic energy moving water and air around until you have this cyclone coming to Florida. It's the exact same
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thing in the Pacific only the Pacific is huge. So really big storms, really big force
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and as with so much that we talk about only getting worse as climate change continues. So we have to keep designing
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for bigger and bigger storms. So it's really great to see some news about people thinking about that and designing
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for that world rather than for the one we had 50 years ago. Right. Uh I have a piece of good news too also
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from a BBC article as well was talking about a type of energy storage system
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that they have in England and uh yeah basically this is maybe one of the next generation of compressed air storage.
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We've talked about compressed air before on the show, but uh this one this one caught my eye because rather than trying
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to use, for example, a gas with a lower specific heat like CO2 to be able to
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save on the uh the state transition and have less overall energy lost as you
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compress and expand and compress and expand. These guys kind of leaned into the phase change of the material. They
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just take regular air, filter it, compress it, compress it again down to
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the point that it actually uh turns from a gas to a liquid. So, this is liquid air storage. And
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wow. At first, you would think, well, if you're doing another round of compressing the gas, it you're you're
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how is this not very how would this be efficient, right? And it's true. If you
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were just cooling the gas and keeping it as a gas, it would be an efficiency rate of maybe like 50%. But these guys
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figured out how to as the liqufied supercooled air is allowed back out,
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spins a turbine just like every other compressed gas uh storage facility. This time they're catching one part of the
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expansion process as it turns back from a liquid into a gas, which means huge amounts of pressure during that phase
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change. And that gets them more up to like 70 80% efficiency comparable with a lot of different energy storage devices
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on the market and grid scale. So, this is something you can do for an entire city. For places that don't have the
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option for pumped hydro, this is fantastic. And uh yeah, they're building this in the north of the UK.
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Are they fantastic? Well, the UK are they're leaders along with Germany and a precious few other locations, but yeah.
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Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. And and you can kind of see the sequence of development that has to happen. First, you expand the offshore
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wind like China is doing and like California has looked into and other places are working on. And then once you
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have all of that renewable generation, then it comes to the issue of dealing
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with short-term storage for daily peaks. And then all of a sudden it becomes
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economically viable to start talking about grids scale storage. Before that, there's no reason to because you don't
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have grids scale renewable energy. You have to get the generation going and then there's business opportunities for
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the storage. Right. Well, fantastic. Thank you for that. Yeah.
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So, so was that the good news? Did we get enough? Are you guys feeling better? Let's let's move on to the main topic.
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Uh the African Great Green Wall. Yes. And so the African green wall, if
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you look at the Google map, you'll see on the African continent, which is huge. Um that in the roughly the center of the
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continent there is from uh from east to west um vegetation. So you can see it on
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the satellite images. And then the northern part of the African continent looks to have much less ve vegetation,
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so deserts or or what have you. And I think that's where the Sahara desert is. And so my understanding of the Great
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Wall initiative in Africa, it's a UN funded initiative so that it's attempting to stop the desert from
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expanding. It's also attempting to reclaim some of those lands and to to install vegetation because
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um those areas tend to have people fleeing when there's not enough vegetation. So there's nothing for them
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to live on. There's nothing for them to grow. Um and and and also it's it's you
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know generally where poor people uh are living out of necessity. And so trying to reclaim some of that land um is the
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initiative. Yeah. Yeah. Uh as you said the Sahara is growing. Uh people don't know this I
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think but there wasn't always a giant desert across the north of Africa. In fact during the time of the last ice
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ages and even during the time of the first agricultural empires the desert part was very small and it was more
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similar to the savannah and grasslands that you see on the other side of the Congo. In fact you had elephants and
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giraffes walking around walking around in northern Africa uh more than 4,000
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years ago. Over time, over time, the desert has advanced and what used to be a giant inland sea is now a very small
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lake that's almost disappeared, Lake Chad. Yeah. So we see this new effort by the
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African Union and the UN to turn around essentially 5 to 10,000 years of
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desertification and try to put a stop to it and reclaim territory for African
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villagers and small-cale farmers who are really the uh the salt of the earth. Literally some people are harvesting
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salt because the earth is is too sandy and salty. So they evaporate uh water
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from the ocean or herd uh goats, camels, sheep, uh anything that can handle the
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environment. Um there's agriculturalists working right next to agrarian herdsmen working right next to uh hunters and
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trappers. This is a very biologically rich part of the world and very culturally rich part of the world. Some
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of the earliest iron smelting happened there. Some of the earliest writing happened there. But this region has uh
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for the past few hundred years been uh shall we say uh selectively managed
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by uh for the most part the French who are still a controlling economic force in the region and were actually some of
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the most principal funders of the African green wall project. Right. Right. and and so yeah, Africa uh
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in terms of you know just talking about the green wall and this idea about the desertification or the the growing
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expanding nature of the Sahara desert it it really is sort a tough situation for anyone who is living there because as
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soon as you lose the plant life then when the monsoon rains come and so
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everybody's watched National Geographic everyone's watched the the animals um where they the animals are having such a
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difficult time the rivers or the creeks are drying up. You see, you know, the alligators are suffering, all the animals are suffering, and then also the
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monsoon rains come and then things turn green where they're able to turn green. But the problem with monsoon rains is
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that it's just too much rain too quick. So then all of a sudden you go from, you know, just dry almost like concrete dry
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but it's sand and then everything gets flooded but it's just too quick and the
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the water cannot be absorbed properly by the land and it cannot replenish the
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water table underneath. It just it just runs off and so then it it's really a matter of trying to
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capture it. But this is what some of the uh the green wall these initiatives this is what some of it tries to do.
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Yeah, absolutely. Uh plants are a really great way of catching and storing water in the local area. Uh you said it really
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well. A desert is not a place where there's never rain. A desert is a place where the water leaves after it rains.
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And that's the fundamental problem because when you have a big rush of water blowing slightly down river out to
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the ocean again, that water is usually bringing along with it all the extra random biological material it picked up.
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The same stuff you have to build soil out of. So you have this compounding problem where you need top soil to keep
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the rain water there. and refill the aquifer, but you need the rain water to build the top soil. And when it just
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comes all in a rush for the whole year, it just takes the top soil away and you end up just getting soot uh just just
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getting uh dust, right? And so, so looking at this Great
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Wall initiative, the Great Green Wall initiative, then there are half moons involved, Tai half moons. And so as soon
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as I saw the Half Moons, I thought, geez, um that looks like that children's dessert. You know, the the wonderful
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little cakes that come in the um you know, the plastic styrofoam or Oh, no, the plastic wrapping. And they have a
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shelf life of about three or four decades. And it's just this wonderfully consistent mix of lovely chemicals with
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some baking in it that just tastes wonderful. It's like a slice of heaven for kids. And I've had so many of them. I don't actually know that product.
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No. Okay. Well, I I'm going to find it because it's ubiquitous over here in North America or it was it was it was
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ubiquitous and so and I'll post it. But anyways, so so yeah. Uh what are the what are the issues about half moons? Why why do half
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moons why are they important and why do they work when you're talking about the the green wall initiative? So as we're trying to retain the water
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so that the soil can build up uh one way to get the water into the soil not just along the top but actually to penetrate
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down is plant roots. They carve spaces between all of the lithic substrate and
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all in those spaces that the plant roots carve, you have microbiomes of fungi and
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bacteria and little microscopic critters running around eating everything. And that's that's life. That's carbon
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storage. That's the basis of agriculture. That's everything we're trying to build. So, the other thing you
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can do to help that happen is create little pockets where the water can't just flow because instead it reaches a
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little uh berm. So what these crescents are is in the direction where the water is going to flow, you create a little a
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little circular embankment but catches some of the water and slows it down. So a little bit percolates uh underneath
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before just carrying on away. Uh in China, which we talked about as having
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another really really effective aforestation program, what they did was basically make square grids and in the
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corners of each of those square grids, there's an indentation to catch a little bit of water and do the exact same thing. Uh in Africa, there's actually a
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traditional practice of carving these crescents. Basically, make a space and with the with the soil that you dug out
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of that space, make the embankment. So, you don't need to add any materials. You can get it done with just shovels and
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willpower. So, people can do it for themselves. And that's really critical because a lot of these places there's
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there's not an Amazon delivery center nearby where they can just go and get everything they need. You know, these
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are people working off of the land, living off of the land, and dependent on that same rainfall that we're talking
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about. So, you have the this crescent design, and inside those crescents, that's where you have the opportunity
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where there's slightly more water collected and a little bit of shade from the sun. That's where you can plant your little uh future forests,
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right? So, that's I mean, it's ingenious. It's it's using um knowledge
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and knowhow. Know that's been around for eons. It's been around for generations perhaps just not being utilized. But but
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I guess the hope which is provided and why these these sort of half moons or
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these ditches are not dug anyways is the fact that there's an initiative to provide for the seeding. And so not only
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are you trapping the water, not just letting it flow off, but then you're also obviously the land productive.
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That's right. And so and so um when you when you look at some of the video which
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has come out of this initiative, it's a it's a grand initiative and so there are very large grandiose sort of plans and
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and hopefully you know they all come to fruition but there is some development uh there are development issues as you might expect because it it spans across
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a number of countries and each country has got their own thing going. there are territorial issues. There are inter
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domestic uh if not civil wars then sort of rival faction issues. So it's not
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smooth sailing but because this initiative has been around since 2007 in some form or another. Um there are areas
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where they have used as you said these half moons or other sort of geometric shapes but basically developing ditches
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or berms in order to catch some of the water and then seeding where they've actually had that going for a decade or
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more. And the video coming from that is fantastic. It's beautiful to see
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as in they have managed to turn what was previously desert just two decades ago
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into a rather lush area which is that when the when the rains come, vegetation
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just absolutely sprouts and because the infrastructure is there, it can actually exist and continue to exist until the
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next monsoon rains come. So that there is some viability. Infrastructure is exactly the right word. Uh so much of the time when we
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talk about infrastructure, we talk about gray infrastructure, stuff that's made out of concrete, you know, roads, power
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plants. These are infrastructure, but so are trees. And and you notice more and more when you have heat waves and
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drought events what the shade of a tree means for the just the environment around and underneath that tree. It
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means literally life or death sometimes. And in these places where you have the risk of desertification, you have heat
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waves, you have water scarcity, and you have yeah a lot of social issues. All of those social issues compound
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the inherent danger of living in such an arid region because the you have people
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who need water and need food and we've seen disasters come out of places like uh Sudan for example and likewise in
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places like Nigeria, Mali uh there are social instability creates and
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exacerbates ecological instability and ecological instability is often one of the sources of social instability. So
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it's compounding effects and because of that uh over the last what uh 15 nearly
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20 years that the green wall project has been going uh there have been some setbacks there have also been some
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amazing success stories and that was going to be the case whenever you had at the start 11 different countries and now
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up to 25 nations involved with very very different results and very very different styles of implementation
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because one of the things they really started figuring out after the first 10 years well they knew this to begin with
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but we've really learned since it's not a one-sizefits-all. You can't come with one planting plan that's going to work
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from Sagal to Niger to Sudan to Ethiopia. It's different plants. It's different trees. It's different
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economies for what they can actually sell from those trees. Uh in some places
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they're doing bowobs and traditional indigenous trees that are very very
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important. We're talking about keystone species for local ecosystems. In others, they're doing uh tamarind or acacias
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that are very very functional for sale and part of traditional diet and indigenous but still uh less for the
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ecosystem and more for people being able to reliably produce food and and get money from those crops for that. Uh in
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other places in other parts of Africa the major reason for planting is to restore ecosystem for elephants so that
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they don't come and stomp down your farm instead. Right? So in every country in
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Africa there's going to be a slightly different set of solutions and although the pace at which they're reaching their
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uh goal of 100 million acres of he sorry yeah 100 million hectares of planted
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trees uh right now we're about maybe 18% of that but we were at only 4% 10 years
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ago. So it is it is scaling up exponentially and could still hit its goal of reaching that 100 million actors
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by 2030. If not, just keep planting. Honestly, it's better than not. But my point is,
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uh, it's been an opportunity to learn from many indigenous cultures because one of the things that we found from
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assessing this project over time, you know, there's monitoring and evaluation, uh, pro processes that happen whenever
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you getting a bunch of money from the UN. And from that what we've discovered is that when local people when the
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indigenous people native to that land are just allowed to manage it you get
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one quarter the rate of deforestation. You get two or three times the profitability from actual agricultural
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production and natural services and most importantly you have sovereignty and dignity for the people that live there.
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So in the most there are some nonsuccesses definitely in the African green wall project but where you see
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successes often is where it became an opportunity to interface between these
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big top- down UN development organizations and indigenous practices that needed to be proliferated because
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they were so functional and so helpful to that specific environment. Right? And and so yes, trees are getting
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planted, but more importantly, we're learning more and more about how to take care of local ecosystems and use those
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to keep growing local economies, which really this is about. Uh as much as they talked about hectares of trees, they
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also talked about how many million jobs are going to be created, about the people's food supplies actually being a
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little less insecure, which imagine what that could what what that could impact. Yes, there's political reasons for, you
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know, boo and all those other groups, but what if everybody's needs were actually met by the baseline production
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of the ecosystem? Whatever else is going on, people are going to be more reasonable, more chill, more peaceful if
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their basic needs are all being met. So, it's kind of uh optimistic, but I think the UN uh really had the right idea on
24:40
this project. And even if we don't reach the right number of hectares in the right number of years, the things that
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have been put in place and the desertification that it stopped or slowed down already worth it.
24:52
Amen. I Well said. Yeah, progress is not linear, but I think it's a I think it's important just
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to to let people know that this is a worthy project. And so it's a worthy project because um you're not talking
25:05
about trying to build something out of nothing and then transporting people into a strange environment and then
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trying to you know trying to make habitable an area which was never meant to be. What you are talking about is you
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are talking about because Africa the African continent is huge. So going west to east it is big and there are some
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countries within that east to west corridor that we're talking about where the desert is encroaching upon
25:29
vegetation. the desert is that's right the Sahel. So the the desert is growing. You're talking about some landlocked
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countries and what what you are talking about is that these areas are are already inhabited or they were inhabited
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when there was some vegetation. It's just that they are being pushed out. So it's very similar to Florida where some
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people are being pushed out because the environment is encroaching in and it's making their areas uninhabitable. But in
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Africa, at least in this area, you have a solution, which is to stop the desert from growing and then to put in play the
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plans to create some vegetation so that people can then have productive land. And so when you talk about progress not
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being linear, when you talk about stops and starts, I read, and this is just amazing because technology catches up
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and then all of a sudden it seems just so obvious. But now the UN program, this great green wall program, is now using
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satellite monitoring in order to monitor the participants to see whether or not they're really doing what they say they're doing. Which of course to the
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rest of us would say, well, why wouldn't you do that from the very start? But again, progress is not linear. You know, you need buyin from these countries. But
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now that there is a more an easier way of quickly figuring out, well, okay, so
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you say that you've created these BMS, these half moons, and you say that you've seated. So then after the monsoon
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rains, you should have some vegetation. We can check that via satellites. And now there's shaming going on country by country. Perhaps that will actually
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assist countries to focus a little bit more because there are always going to be reasons why you you don't do this
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because this is a long-term investment. You could take the money immediately and then throw it into something else as a country. But this
27:03
maybe AI tech stocks. Exactly. Or crypto. Yeah, why not?
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But anyways, yeah. Um but you know if your president is not owning a crypto company and personally benefiting then
27:15
perhaps then this money can go towards something which is going to just simply benefit the greater good and it's going
27:20
to give people hope. It it is hope because if you are reclaiming lands that are productive
27:26
that you know in past generations have been productive then you are giving people to something to live for.
27:31
That's right. I imagine the the impact for us it's whatever you're in Toronto
27:36
you're not going to be directly impacted by the microclimate created by a forest somewhere in Ghana but collectively I
27:43
mean we're we're we're talking about the difference for that community after 40
27:48
or 60 years of the new green revolution coming and having to transfer to new crops you've never heard of to be sold
27:54
on the international market using pesticides and fertilizers you have no idea how they work if anyone does That
28:01
type of agriculture is on its way out. And the easier life is going to be easier for all of us
28:08
the better we do that transition back to what actually works to a combination of traditional practices and what has been
28:15
found to be best practices available using modern technology. And this this green wall project really is an
28:21
opportunity to do that with in involving satellites and also newer financing models that try to focus putting the
28:27
money into the community rather than into the pockets of some planners somewhere mid to high up in the process.
28:33
Uh there's lessons learned with projects like this and I think that everything that happened in Africa since 2007 we're
28:40
going to take forward to future aforestation projects around the world with even more impact and even more
28:47
specific focus. I I remember one example from the African green wall. Uh I forget
28:52
what country it was, but there was this interesting impact where uh essentially the uh communities of this one region
28:59
had divvied up who's in control of what in the community by gender. So the animals were taken care of by the men
29:05
and the plants by the women. This traditionally had reinforced traditional uh patriarchies because cows and goats
29:13
are where the money is at. You know, they're easy to trade so they become currency. you can't just transfer acres behind your house, right? But also, uh
29:21
they're they're they're very soughtafter, so they're very high priced commodities, the products that you get from the animals. So, this kind of
29:28
default gave the men economic superiority over the other half of the economy, despite all of us still needing
29:33
to eat our vegetables. So when the green wall came into these communities where this was the practice and all of a
29:39
sudden the women were empowered to plant a bunch of trees where they didn't have any before,
29:45
this boosted their income relatively to the men's which allowed more schools, more reproductive rights, more
29:51
empowerment of women leadership in the communities fundamentally changing the local culture in a disruptive way but
29:59
also collectively in a good way. Because one of the other things that we've seen from years of studying the statistics of
30:04
development is when you empower women, you empower the community, right? Yeah. Absolutely. And and the the
30:11
microloans system uh has shown that with just absolutely brilliant results. And so logically, it just doesn't make sense
30:19
to not empower half your population. Um now now one thing uh in order to give
30:25
listeners even more hope Diane and I I know you and I are all over this but one thing that people should also keep in
30:30
mind and and I don't think it's a small thing in 2007 this initiative started with good intentions and um you know buy
30:38
in and so it's gone through sort of ups and downs and there are progress is not
30:43
linear but the recent development of solar as the cheapest way to produce energy you
30:49
know you have to consider that because again when you when you talk about these areas there are still not just in this
30:57
area but on the African continent there are 600 million to 700 million people
31:02
without any electricity not electricity sometimes not electricity with brownouts no electricity so when you talk about
31:09
solar and you talk about these areas that are the hardest hit that don't have anything if you can give a small village
31:16
three solar panels or you can give them 30 solar panels or 300 solar panels,
31:21
they're going to do something great with it. Now, with solar panels in particular, you can actually, if you
31:26
have the means and you have some concrete and some building materials, you can actually build them up a little
31:32
bit higher and uh with the agrootic concept, you can build them to provide some shade to the ground underneath and
31:39
then try to farm or build some vegetation underneath. Agrovoltaics. Yes, this is one of my favorites. So, you know, maybe you can
31:45
talk about that because it it all plays into the fact that you're trying to create a situation where the monsoon
31:51
rains some of it is captured so that the water can also naturally soak in and
31:57
increase the water table which everybody relies upon for drinking and also for agriculture. So, you need to replenish
32:02
the water table on an annual basis. But, but it also with the shade and cooling down the ambient temperature of the the
32:09
surface, you promote more vegetation growth. It just seems like a win-winwin. And the solar as we have talked about
32:16
the solar revolution has really occurred in the last call it 5 years because
32:21
prior to that solar was still expensive and as of the past few years and as of today it's not expensive it is cheap and
32:28
so when you add solar which is energy generation electricity generation to this concept of the great green wall you
32:36
know you have to sit back and think well wait a second maybe in five years we're going to be talking about some wonderful developments
32:41
in fact uh Because we've got four different systems that have to integrate with each other. And the crazy thing is
32:48
they actually work better with each other. You have the hurting of animals, agrarianism. You have the domestication
32:54
and cultivation of plants, agriculture. You have trees uh which is to say uh
33:00
silvaulture and and you also have solar panels for the interesting thing about
33:05
trees and solar panels is they're essentially doing the same job. They're providing shade while converting solar
33:11
energy into available energy. That is fundamentally what trees do and why they're the basis of rebuilding
33:17
ecosystems and thus ecologies and thus ecosystems and even economies. Trees are
33:24
the basis because that's where the energy is being exchanged. Trees and solar panels can be mixed with
33:29
agriculture and uh sheep, goat, cow pasturing uh really effectively in a
33:36
variety of ways. You can basically use any combination of stuff that has to go in the ground and stuff that has to go
33:42
slightly in the air and they cool each other and make each other more efficient. Right. Right. Right. People I
33:47
I don't know if everyone knows this, but uh photovoltaic cells have a set range of temperatures in which they're most
33:53
efficient to operate and past that you have uh operation losses. They don't like melt per se, but they don't operate
33:59
quite as efficiently as within a certain temperature range. So you can actually get more electricity out of your solar
34:04
panels if you plant them smart with the right amount of trees and crops underneath them to keep everything cool
34:10
to keep the plants cool with the solar panels, the solar panels cool with the trees and the animals cool with the solar panels and the trees.
34:16
Right. Right. And and yeah, uh you can anywhere even in the desert build a thriving world with these basic systems.
34:24
Well, so it it is just amazing if you don't work in the area, if you don't uh try to break out of the algorithm that
34:31
social media is giving to you and then reach out and try to find out this information then you know why would you know about this but so the African great
34:38
green wall that's one initiative but perhaps we can give a survey just a quick survey to our our listeners and
34:44
give them some hope there are a number of other countries also sort of focused on this now most prominent of which is
34:50
China they have planted over the past three decades an enormous just a mindn numbing shocking number of trees. I
34:56
didn't know that until recently. And but there are other countries as well that have um these reforestation programs or
35:03
or trying to reclaim some land from their own deserts. So I'm thinking about India. I'm thinking about Saudi Arabia.
35:09
Um even in the United States, they have reforestation programs. Now don't don't forget about Europe. Europe
35:14
has its own green wall project happening where there used to be this giant basically unending forest. uh basically
35:21
everywhere close to Poland used to be just this rolling mountains and forests going all the way from the north to the
35:27
south of the continent subcontinent let's be honest and uh over the course of the last uh 6 or 800 years we've lost
35:35
a lot of that land and lost a lot of the keystone species that used to be in that land for example the uh genetic origin
35:42
of the modern cow the orics the last one went extinct in the 1400s because of
35:47
encroachment of its natural habitat in those forests in Eastern Europe and they're trying to regrow that to an
35:53
extent, right? Well, maybe you can tell people about the Chinese effort and we'll start
35:58
off with them not because we want to be China's focus, but when you talk about planting trees, people should know about
36:05
this because, you know, a head and tails above everyone else, they've really done a great sustained jobs just by the sheer
36:12
numbers. So, maybe you can tell listeners about that. Well, uh, it is by far the most acreage covered. Uh, I I
36:20
really want to emphasize why it was such a smart idea for China to do this when and where they did it. They were facing
36:27
How many trees are we talking about? Just ballpark. Oh, was it was it 60 billion trees or something?
36:35
Something like that. I'm going to I'm going to find the number. I'm going to put the number is flashing right here somewhere, right? Because the number is so high
36:42
that you have to double check it. You have to go to various sources and you have to assure yourself that you've got
36:48
to be kidding me. Number one, how did they plant so many trees? And number two, why didn't I know about it? That was my reaction.
36:53
Well, the first well easy answers to both of those. Uh they they started 50 years ago, which is the best time to
36:59
plant a tree is decades ago. Always second best time being now. And uh and
37:04
you don't hear about it because it's a success story coming coming from, you know, not the imperial corps of uh
37:11
western culture. So people don't I think realize that there was a great deal of
37:17
famine uh after the revolution in China and for several decades after that there
37:22
were issues of dust storms that would I mean visibility gone breathing
37:28
difficult. It basically have to just shut down life and wait for the dust storm to pass. And this was essentially
37:34
giant bouts of wind picking up sand from the western desert in China and then dumping it all over crop lands and
37:41
cities in the rest of China, mostly in the north. And uh yeah, they decided to
37:47
if the desert's going to mess with us, we're going to mess with the desert. And they decided to basically push it back
37:53
by planting so many trees that there's now a new ecosystem. So many trees that the dust storm stopped. so many trees
38:00
that it fundamentally shifted the rainfall patterns of the entire region drawing water away from the south in the
38:07
mountains of the Himalayas so that more ends up pooling and staying in this area where they were planting the trees
38:13
because spoiler uh trees are not just great for planting and running next to solar panels and having your sheep and
38:19
cows underneath. They're also really good for humans. They cool us, they shade us, they protect us from the
38:24
weather. And uh in fact, trees are one of the most effective ways to deal with particulate air pollution, smog, because
38:30
the leaves actually catch it before it gets into your lungs. So trees are this
38:35
amazing kind of catch-all solution and China decided to use them to such a scale that uh here in in western China
38:43
and in the Amazon basin these are the two test places where we discovered something we didn't know I think uh a
38:49
few decades ago and that is that trees actually cause rain. Yeah. So it's
38:55
called evapotranspiration and it's the process by which trees will pull water out of the soil and uh the water
39:00
evaporates. It's same way as sweating for us, same way as breathing for us, the trees will actually lose a little
39:06
bit of water out of each of their leaves throughout the course of the day, which hugely hugely impacts humidity levels.
39:11
And when you have enough humidity, what do you have? Rainclouds. So it turns out that this cloud forest
39:17
phenomenon of South America, this rainforest phenomenon we see in Borneo, in the Congo region, in the Amazon
39:23
region, this is not just damp because of glo global uh weather patterns, but it's
39:28
also such a human environment in each of these places because the trees are there. The trees are there because
39:34
there's so much water available and there's so much water available because the trees are there. Here we see again
39:39
this positive feedback cycle that reinforces itself, right? and and and for a lifetime avid
39:48
news weather watcher. So the weather person shows up on the screen and I watch the weather and I'm looking at it
39:54
and this is all wonderful. But to say it in layman terms, what you've already explained, but the headline that you've
40:00
explained is simply that China has planted so many trees over the past few decades that they've changed the weather
40:07
that they have changed the water table. They've changed the environment in the
40:13
areas that they have planted because they've just planted so many trees. They didn't stop. They just kept at it and
40:19
then the trees took over and then just changed the weather. Yeah. And that's what we're hoping for long term for the Sahel region and
40:25
that's what somebody is going to have to start doing in South America once we're finally done cutting down the rainforests.
40:31
Right. Well, COP 30 Brazil um you know I know for people who have been in the
40:36
environment game and trying to help the world for a long time you know look at these pronouncements with sort of you
40:42
know weariness but but there's an attempt there uh maybe the funding hasn't really quite followed but there's
40:47
an attempt there to try to to stop the deforestation in Brazil the rainforest. I I mean that's that would be a good
40:53
thing, wouldn't it? Absolutely. And this is why again I mention uh new funding models because uh
40:59
you know blended finance really seems to be the future for these types of projects. That's where you get a little bit of grant money and you also get a
41:05
little bit of private investment that handinand wants to yes grow our capacity but then eventually take a little bit
41:11
off the top as a cut. Right? And that is a very effective model for places that have no reason why they couldn't be
41:17
bread baskets other than the fact that they've been mismanaged for a few decades or a couple generations, right?
41:23
And and so I I hope we'll start seeing more and more of that kind of blended finance structure where people are
41:28
actually leveraging not just indigenous knowledge but also global assets to grow
41:34
these out as fast as possible because we kind of need the food, kind of need the carbon storage as soon as possible,
41:41
right? and and and maybe and maybe faster than government could do by itself with its remaining tax and revenue or than private industry would
41:47
think to do because it's not short-term uh profitable. Right. Right. Well, and if any listeners
41:53
are are interested, I guess just a point to leave with them is that um China, uh
41:58
the African continent, uh Europe, they're not the only places with large reforestation plans. Um you know, as I
42:05
said, India has a plan and they've had some progress. Saudi Arabia, the oil baron, uh, is actually trying to
42:11
implement some plans. And, of course, the US as well. A lot of this news gets, you know, sort of lost in the mix. It
42:16
doesn't make it above the den of the noise of the other things, but but there are some important initiatives. It's just great for people to know this and
42:22
then, of course, when time comes then also to support it so that so that more good things can come as well. That's right. Uh, in fact, if we're
42:28
going to say there's a call to action for this episode, it is that there is a aforestation project, a canopy
42:34
restoration or management project happening in your town. You just have to find who it is that's doing it. Show up.
42:40
They'll teach you in half an hour how to plant a tree. You'll have a great day working outside. Drink some lemonade.
42:46
It'll be so rewarding. I encourage you to get involved with your local nature management because no matter where you
42:53
are, there's a government project or a nonprofit or just a group of volunteers that love gardening that are doing the
42:59
work that needs to be done. You just got to go out and find them. Excellent. Well, that's wonderful. That's a lovely way to end this episode.
43:05
So, thank you very much, Ty. Thank you, Greg. And thank you everyone for listening. We'll catch you next
43:10
time. Next time. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Climate Basics podcast. Please
43:18
remember to like and subscribe and leave us your comments. We look forward to seeing you next time. Goodbye.
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