Our planet Earth is heating and we cannot ignore this fact anymore. Some people are in denial but not the ECO Council from St.Clare’s Abbey Primary School. They took the opportunity during Catholic School’s Week to highlight the issue of Global Warming to a huge gathering. Every year all the schools in the Diocese come together and this year they gathered in St. Therese’s Banbridge.
Planting billions of trees across the world is one of the biggest and cheapest ways of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas.
As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research led by Professor Tom Crowther from the Swiss University ETH Zürich estimated that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions from human activities that remain in the atmosphere today, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.
They say it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.
Professor Crowther emphasized that it remains vital to reverse the current trends of rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and forest destruction, and bring them down to zero. He said this is needed to stop the climate crisis becoming even worse and because the forest restoration envisaged would take 50-100 years to have its full effect of removing 200 billion tonnes of carbon.
Our ECO Council distributed 60 trees to all the Primary Schools and Post Primary Schools in our Diocese during Catholic Schools Week. This is a wonderful start and will help reduce some Carbon Dioxide Emissions but…
We all have to do more!
