The world is literally a greener place than it was 20 years ago, and data from NASA satellites has revealed that the two countries with the world’s biggest populations are also responsible for the largest increase in green foliage.
Good news for green thumbs: The world is a greener place than it was 20 years ago. 🌏 Data from @NASAEarth satellites shows that human activity in China and India dominate this greening of the planet, thanks to tree planting & agriculture. Get the data: https://t.co/8LRXR7xcpS pic.twitter.com/UlyXhzA9Uq
— NASA (@NASA) February 12, 2019
Between 2000 and 2017, a NASA sensor known as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) gathered high-resolution data of the Earth’s surface from aboard two satellites, the Terra and the Aqua.
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Both countries have engineered a significant increase in food production, thanks to ‘multiple cropping practices,’ which see fields replanted and crops harvested multiple times each year. ‘Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more have increased by about 35-40% since 2000 to feed their large populations,’ NASA said.
‘China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9% of the planet’s land area covered in vegetation which is a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from overexploitation,’ Chi Chen, the study’s lead author and a graduate researcher at Boston University’s Department of Earth and Environment, said in a statement.
The researchers emphasized that this phenomenon does not make up for negative impacts on environmental ecosystems elsewhere. ‘The gain in greenness, which mostly occurred in the Northern temperate and high latitudes, does not offset the damage from loss of leaf area in tropical natural vegetation,’ the study authors wrote, citing depleted areas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil and Indonesia.
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