What if we could restore the world’s forests, one billion trees at a time?
Such is the intention of ex-NASA engineer Lauren Fletcher and his team at BioCarbon Engineering. And their plan to make it a reality?
BioCarbon Engineering are hoping to enable “industrial scale reforestation” by employing drones to carry out the task of reseeding vast amounts of fertile land. The complex, three-part process through which they plan to achieve such an important mission finds balance between relatively cheap but ineffectual air-seeding practices, and the timely, costly task of planting by hand.
When in operation, the drones will be able to seed 36,000 trees a day, at only 15% of the cost of hand planting.
The initiative could not come at a more important time. A recent study published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) found that the rate of tropical deforestation increased by 62% between the 1990s and 2000s. The findings – resulting from analysis of Landsat image data collected over two decades – essentially debunks theories held by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation, who claimed deforestation had actually fallen 25% over that period based on “a collection of reports from dozens of countries”.
That’s a rate of 6.5 billion trees annually.
Such grim statistics highlight the need for startups like BioCarbon Engineering, especially in light of the UN Climate Council’s commitment to end deforestation by restoring 350 million hectares of land by 2030.
The team hopes to have the drones in operation by the end of the US summer.
For more information on BioCarbon Engineering, their plans, and process, you can visit the official website.