Anyone working on new tech to plant trees more efficiently? Or engineering trees optimized for carbon sequestration?

Technology is not the biggest challenge to reforesting, people are. What good is planting millions of trees with robots if poor peasants graze their goats in the area that kill them all? To succeed you need to get them to buy into the outcome.

China's efforts on the Loess Plateau has been held up as a success in reforestation which has also benefited the local agricultural economy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK8JNXHcBMA

"The area of restoration on the Loess Plateau in China is the size of Belgium and thousands of years of subsistence farming had made it barren and infertile. In 1995 the Chinese Government, with support from The World Bank, took drastic action to rehabilitate the plateau, and local people -- seen as both perpetuators and victims of the devastation -- became part of the solution. They completely transformed 8.6 million acres of wasteland into hyper-productive land. This caused a 300% increase in agricultural income and enabled millions of local family farmers to break free from entrenched poverty."

Thanks, I watched the whole video. A great success of natural capitalism. I wonder how drone surveys, satellite mapping, and synthetic biology could extend this 35 sq-km success to 3,500 sq-km and beyond, augmenting people's needs and efforts. As said in the video, let's "properly understand the miracles performed by trees" to make this more profitable and spread everywhere.

I also agree with the farmer who said "what about our children, they can't eat trees!!". There's an opportunity for climate change solutions need to be communicated at human timescales (days, months, years). Decades are too hard to imagine.

Thanks for the video!

Perhaps its not exactly the best example of capitalism given that it was centrally planned.

Glad you found it interesting. In the text accompanying the video they link to more videos in the series from Ethiopia and Rwanda, with similar projects to rehabilitate the land.

Food is key. This inspired me to re-read the 4 pages on Food in "Sustainable Energy without the hot air": https://www.withouthotair.com/c13/page_76.shtml

(ps I just put this great book up on github. The author passed away, would love ideas to re-release the CC content.

Specifically, merging the short Food chapter into a nicely formatted single medium-type article would be a good step for readability: https://github.com/titojankowski/sustainable_energy_without_...)

Ok it took an hour but I reformatted the "food" chapter on my blog as an experiment in readability.

http://titojankowski.com/sustainable-energy-without-hot-air-...

Thoughts?

Centralized planning == state capitalism. Private capitalism is not the only variety.

For the latter, I think the research and other work for using Paulownia trees for carbon sequestration qualifies. I do seem to recall that there was some attempt to further cultivate it to be more suitable for that purpose.

Thanks! I hadnt heard of Paulownia before. 3-10x more sequestration than the average tree: http://paulowniabg.info/?page_id=56

One challenge with plant-based sequestration is that the carbon is released when the tree dies/decomposes. I wonder how planting more trees will balance out at the decade-century scale.

Cut them down when mature and use them as building material.

Wow cool, at first I said "but the CO2 gets released when the building burns down", so I looked into it. Apparently wood has a ton of benefits, basically it doesn't release much of the CO2 if it just sits there (http://www.awc.org/pdf/education/gb/ReThinkMag-GB500A-Evalua...). And it takes far less energy to grow a tree than the respective amount of concrete/other building materials (http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/new-study-confi...). So wood->building materials is a great option. Right on!

"Since it is generally advantageous to have a heterogeneous mix of tree species planted in the same area, the planting UAV is capable of carrying a mix of seeds and control their planting pattern.​"

Cooooooooooool. Thanks!