Over the past decades China has undertaken a large reforestation project in the norther part of the country, which has been widely successful. They had planted something like 70B trees. However what they came across was that while the project worked in stopping desertification and reforesting the area, that the new forests created a serious impact on the ground water supply, which in China is already scarce in the northern part of the country, so now they have to import large quantities of water from the south and from other places. Will the sort of large scale reforestation projects that are being proposed around the world not face a problem of increasing water shortages as things continue getting worse?
Also for the movie I thought it was strange the criticism focused on claims of overpopulation, the movie never really put forth any such arguments from what i remember, it just addressed that overconsumption and overproduction is present in our society. Overpopulation is a really dumb prevailing narrative though.
Yes! I’ve actually written papers about China’s “Green Wall” initiative back when they were doing trials for it and watching it actually succeed feels amazing. These sorts of large scale projects are certainly possible but any large scale project will also have large scale impact. I know one thing that hasn’t happened with the green wall initiative that was predicted is that it HASNT increased rainfall, and as you’ve said this has had an impact on ground water. As for these projects elsewhere in the world, some will have water issues and some won’t. It really depends on where they are happening.
One very scary example, at least to me, is that many places in South America that used to be rainforest but were clear cut for farming simply no longer have the moisture or biodiversity to support a rainforest in the area. Many of these cycles are self-perpetuating, which is what China anticipated happening but unfortunately didn’t.
