Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

NASA: World Gets Greener


Fri 19 Jul 2019 | 11:04 PM
Yassmine Elsayed

NASA has just confirmed that the world is a greener place today than it was 20 years ago. Analysts attributed this to China and India.

According to a recent report by Forbes, both countries are responsible for the largest greening of the planet in the past two decades. The two most populous countries have implemented ambitious tree planting programs and scaled up their implementation and technology around agriculture.

India continues to break world records in tree planting, with 800,000 Indians planting 50 million trees in just 24 hours.

https://youtu.be/uS438Tu4NvE

The recent finding by NASA and published in the journal Nature Sustainability, compared satellite data from the mid-1990s to today using high-resolution imagery.

The satellite imagery revealed that greening was disproportionately located in China and India. If the greening was primarily a response from climate change and a warming planet, the increased vegetation shouldn't be limited to country borders.

According to the report, NASA used Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to get a detailed picture of Earth's global vegetation through time. The technique provided up to 500-meter resolution for the past two decades.

Since 90's when the focus shifted from urbanization to reducing air and soil pollution and combating climate change, the two countries made tremendous shifts in their overall land use.