An awful lot of trees

Dave Powell

08 February 2011

Despite years of abuse by loggers, the Amazon rainforest is still, in the scheme of things, Very Big.

That dawned on me last Friday as I was getting ready for an interview with kids' TV programme Newsround.

Newsround! My 10-year-old Presspacking self would've near expired with glee - even if you'd told him he'd be talking not about robots or lasers or trains but trees.

Newsround wanted me to talk to me about the grim news that last year, thanks to the second devastating drought in just 5 years, billions of the Amazon's trees were wiped out. 

And I thought: crikey - billions of trees? I struggle to visualise a thousand. A billion, or more? That's a lot of trees.

Newsround is for 6-12 year olds, so doing an interview was a) mildly terrifying and b) great practice at talking about climate change in a straightforward way. I got it down to this, more or less:

1. Trees do us a massive favour by absorbing lots of the carbon dioxide we produce.
2. If they die, not only are they not around to absorb CO2 in the future, but the pollution they've already soaked up is spat back out.
3. You can't lose that many trees without some hefty consequences - and not just for the countless birds and animals that live in them.
4. Normally the Amazon forests soak up more than a quarter of all the world's atmospheric carbon.
5. But the drought meant that last year the Amazon emitted more CO2 than it soaked up.
6. We're told the odds on two big droughts so close together are pretty low (the previous one was in 2005). Scientists can't say for sure that climate change is to blame - but we do know that climate change would increase the chances of drought in the future.
7. Forests don't have a limitless capacity to take everything we throw at them. Billions of trees certainly sounds a lot, but even lots of big trees can be surprisingly fragile.

I hope I managed, in my fuddy-duddyish way, to impart that to a small chunk of the nation's yoof. After all, they'll be the ones dealing with the mess if we don't start doing things differently.

- Dave Powell, Economics team