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05/16/2007 01:47 PM
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Budget for Restoring Earth Page 1 |
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by Lester R. Brown
Annual Earth Restoration Budget
| Funding | Goal | | $6 billion | Reforesting the earth | | $14 billion | Protecting topsoil on cropland | | $9 billion | Restoring rangelands | | $13 billion | Restoring fisheries | | $31 billion | Protecting biological diversity | | $10 billion | Stabilizing water tables | | $93 billion | TOTAL |
The health of an economy cannot be separated from that of its natural support systems. More than half the world's people depend directly on croplands, rangelands, forests, and fisheries for their livelihoods. Many more depend on forest product industries, leather goods industries, cotton and woolen textile industries, and food processing for their jobs. A strategy for eradicating poverty will not succeed if an economy's environmental support systems are collapsing. If croplands are eroding and harvests are shrinking, if water tables are falling and wells are going dry, if rangelands are turning to desert and livestock are dying, if fisheries are collapsing, if forests are shrinking, and if rising temperatures are scorching crops, a poverty-eradication program--no matter how carefully crafted and well implemented--will not succeed. Restoring the earth will take an enormous international effort, one even larger and more demanding than the often-cited Marshall Plan that helped rebuild war-torn Europe and Japan. And such an initiative must be undertaken at wartime speed lest environmental deterioration translate into economic decline, just as it did for earlier civilizations that violated nature's thresholds and ignored its deadlines. Restoring ForestsWe can roughly estimate how much it will cost to reforest the earth, protect the earth's topsoil, restore rangelands and fisheries, stabilize water tables, and protect biological diversity. Where data and information are lacking, we fill in with assumptions. The goal is not to have a set of precise numbers, but a set of reasonable estimates for an earth restoration budget. In calculating the cost of reforestation, the focus is on developing countries since forested area is already expanding in the northern hemisphere's industrial countries. Meeting the growing fuelwood demand in these countries will require an estimated 55 million additional hectares of forested area. Anchoring soils and restoring hydrological stability would require roughly another 100 million hectares located in thousands of watersheds in developing countries. Recognizing some overlap between these two, we will reduce the 155 million total to 150 million hectares. Beyond this, an additional 30 million hectares will be needed to produce lumber, paper, and other forest products. Only a small share of this tree planting will likely come from plantations. Much of the planting will be on the outskirts of villages, along field boundaries, along roads, on small plots of marginal land, and on denuded hillsides. The big deforestation success story is South Korea, which over the last four decades has reforested its once denuded mountains and hills using locally mobilized labor. Other countries, including China, have tried extensive reforestation but mostly under more arid conditions and with much less success. Turkey has an ambitious NGO-led grassroots reforestation program, relying heavily on volunteer labor. So, too, does Kenya, where women's groups led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai have planted 30 million trees. If seedlings cost $40 per thousand, as the World Bank estimates, and if the typical planting rate is roughly 2,000 per hectare, then seedlings cost $80 per hectare. Labor costs for planting trees are high, but since much of the labor for planting these trees would consist of locally mobilized volunteers, we are assuming a total of $400 per hectare, including both seedlings and labor. With a total of 150 million hectares to be planted over the next decade, this will come to roughly 15 million hectares per year at $400 each for a total annual expenditure of $6 billion. Conserving TopsoilConserving the earth's topsoil by reducing erosion to the rate of new soil formation or below involves two principal steps. One is to retire the highly erodible land that cannot sustain cultivation--the estimated one tenth of the world's cropland that accounts for perhaps half of all erosion. For the United States, that has meant retiring 14 million hectares (nearly 35 million acres), at a cost of close to $50 per acre or $125 per hectare, for a total annual cost approaching $2 billion. The second initiative consists of adopting conservation practices on the remaining land that is subject to excessive erosion--that is, erosion that exceeds the natural rate of new soil formation. The initiative includes incentives to encourage farmers to adopt conservation practices such as contour farming, strip cropping, and, increasingly, minimum-till or no-till farming. These expenditures in the United States total roughly $1 billion per year.
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