Deforestation in the tropical regions of the world released 2.2 billion tons of carbon in 2007, at the same time forestation in the temperate regions absorbed 0.7 billion tons. Giving a balance of 1.5 billion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere due to this cause and contributing to global warming. This equals 15 % of the total amount of carbon released into the air that year.
In Asia deforestation is driven by a fast growing demand for timber. In Africa by the gathering of fuel wood and the clearing of new land for farming. In Latin America it’s the growing demand for soybeans and beef that are to blame. Half of all the deforestation occurs in only two countries; Brazil and Indonesia.
On the other hand three countries have implemented partial or complete bans on deforestation; China, Thailand and the Philippines. Floods and landslides have been the causing factors, which made rulers realize that it made more economic sense to keep the forests that logging them. Since then loggers in China are paid to plant trees instead of cutting them down.
It is also known that to stabilize the climate it would be needed to stop deforestation worldwide and instead plant more trees. Today deforestation is the single major source of CO2.
Deforestation is no longer a matter of local, or even national interest, as it has become the major driver of global warming and worldwide rising seas.
The leading Swedish energy firm Vattenfall, has examined the large-scale potential for foresting wasteland to sequester CO2. They believe that of 1.86 billion hectares of degraded lands that exist (land that used to be forestland, cropland or grassland), half could be profitably reclaimed. They say that the maximum technical potential of these 930 million hectares is to absorb roughly 21.6 billion tons of CO2 per year, more than what is currently released every year from deforestation and many other polluting activities together.
This means we have a chance to stop global warming and its effects; all we have to do is plant those trees. And this is what Treehoo.com works for, intending to use some of the huge revenues Internet advertising and e-commerce generates, to plant new trees worldwide. Treehoo.com aims to offer services similar to search engines and web portals like Yahoo.com or Google.com and use part of the profit to forestation, thus becoming the worlds first green search engine (today search engine revenues sum up to more than 30 billion U.S. dollars and e-commerce in the U.S.A. alone sum up to about 140 billion dollars annually).
Treehoo.com was started in 2008 and without making any pr campaigns it has already received visits from more than 100 countries, many visitors return and about 80 % add the page to their favorite bookmarks on their browsers. Today Treehoo.com is looking for partners, investors and media coverage. The idea is to keep on developing the page that today offers web search through Google or Yahoo and some e-commerce, to become a complete web portal offering more services like: webmail, broadcasting, IP telephony (VoIP), chatting, virtual communities and much more, always using part of the revenues generated to reforestate our planet.
Facts for this entry where taken from the article “Planting trees and managing soils to sequester carbon“ at www.earthpolicy.org and from an article by Johan Liakka (in Swedish), Sveriges Television (Sweden’s public broadcasting network) .
