This Feature Is An Improved Grassland Field Used As Pasture: Fill & Download for Free

I'm not sure how to begin to answer this question, given that it touches so many different issues in this space, and what little information tends to reach the general public is filled with FUD and toxic dross that usually comes through the mouth of lobbyists or activists, needless to say with a very strong political bias as well. I won't say I don't have a professional stake in the industry given my job and areas of technical focus, but I'll try to offer my honest, hopefully balanced opinion.There are a couple of different issues here, and I will try to break them up and address them as separately as I can.What's the definition of a first-generation biofuel? The definition that ActionAid uses is that it consists of any biofuel here from food crops. However, their definition doesn't quite ring true. They include "oil seeds, palm oil, sugar cane, sugar beet, wheat..." and while most of those are correctly identified as food crops, sugarcane does not belong on that list. Cane sugar is not a food crop. It's a sweetener, and this is an important distinction that needs to be made, particularly with regards to ethanol.Second, by "the environment" there seem to be two clear issues here. The first is the issue of land use change, direct and indirect, and the second is the issue of carbon emissions (which is connected, in large part, to the first). We have to address the issue of differential impacts based on the type of fuel and the temporal, geographic, and legal and regulatory features each one is affected by. Here there's a big difference between ethanol and FAME (that being first-generation biodiesel), in that the feedstocks have vastly disparate impacts.There are clear land use impacts from the production of first-generation biofuels. There are direct effects, where land is used for biofuel production to the exclusion of natural flora and fauna or existing crops, and indirect effects where this affects the land use in other sectors like cattle ranching, the growing of competing crops, and land clearance. The latter is referred to as ILUC (Indirect Land Use Change). I've saved my talk about it for below because it's difficult to treat properly without derailing this whole answer.The short version of all of this is that any biofuel increase is going to require cropland, much of which will indirectly replace crops that go into food (however indirect that might be). For ethanol, this is most commonly sugarcane, sugar beet, field corn (maize), and wheat. For FAME biodiesel, this is most commonly palm oil, rapeseed oil (aka canola), and soy oil. The impacts of each of these depends on the level of new plantings, where those plantings occur, and (importantly, often overlooked) the type of byproducts available.Sugarcane plantings tend to displace pasture and soy growing land in Brazil; any changes here tend to be indirect. Corn plantings tend to displace tallgrass prairie and soy (by removing soy from the rotation). Sugar beet and wheat tend to displace other temperate crops used directly for food. The extent to which all of these effects occurs is dependent on the intensity of growth and the ability of the byproducts to displace whatever the crop was originally used for. This last effect is most significant with corn and wheat, where distiller's grains make up well over a third of the amount of corn put into biofuels production as a substitute animal feed to replace the field corn or wheat (though wheat is much less commonly employed as a feed).*Palm oil is generally expanded at the expense of tropical rainforest, primarily in Malaysia and Indonesia, while rapeseed oil is expanded primarily in European grassland and Canadian tallgrass prairie. Interestingly, soy oil production is more or less unaffected by biofuels demand, since the primary product of soy processing is animal feed rather than oil itself. All oil processes will produce some kind of seedcake or seed flake which is sold as animal feed.But why do we care? All of these land use changes ultimately feed back into the carbon balance of a fuel, and clearing out rainforest to get biodiesel doesn't sit well on the CO2 emissions ledger.For each type and feedstock of first-generation fuel, there have been many studies done on their overall direct emissions versus the amount that they displace from fossil fuels. Most studies that estimate directly measurable emissions and displacement give a net reduction in anthropogenic carbon from measurable sources for most biofuels, the very best being sugarcane ethanol and the very worst usually being Central America, Indonesia or Malaysia-based palm FAME biodiesel. This isn't to say that they're all necessarily replacing fossil carbon on a one-to-one basis - Argonne National Labs modeling puts the estimate at a roughly 23% reduction, last I looked, for corn ethanol - but it's not awful. For palm biodiesel, studies on marginal production have results so bad that the direct land use change penalty has been enough to significantly toughen standards in Europe, which is major sink for global biodiesel (in the U.S. it's an afterthought compared to ethanol).And now, about ILUC... this is a subject mired in a lot of controversy that I could write a novella on; rather than going into detail I'll just lay out a few general points. I think it's clear that indirect land use change exists. There is simply no case where land use change from any crop can be seen as exogenous in the regional sense, and if the economy in which it is produced is globally integrated then it is also not globally exogenous. There are effects both on price of the good, which might presumably increase the supplies grown, and on the competition this provides to other uses for the same land. ILUC is clearly nonzero... and yet...The problem with the way ILUC is now portrayed and breathlessly reported upon is that the methodology of the studies available are seriously flawed. The most famous studies have a methodology that depended upon yields of crops remaining fixed, one-for-one land swaps between virgin natural land and new cropland, and mechanisms acting through single types of globally integrated crops. The methodologies of these studies also often used correlations based on estimated deforestation or land use change in response to their chosen independent variable (e.g., the price of soy).Despite the adoption of these and other estimates by policymakers, I find them highly irresponsible and speculative in nature; most notably, by attempting to make biofuel crops endogenous they make other, more significant factors like technology improvement, yield increases, environmental policy, competition between crop types and actual farmer behavior as exogenous. For example, a major assumption underlying the early Searchinger et. al. study of 2008's estimate of land use change due to soy production based on an early correlation from satellite data on deforestation in Brazil with the soy price has basically disappeared due to the success of Brazil's new forest policy. Corn acreage has expanded to a level well below that of what many ILUC-pushers were predicting mainly due to stupendous yield increases in US farms. Brazilian cattle ranching yields and intensity increases are almost never taken into account. And so on.It's not up to me to do a formal criticism of these papers and others - researchers at everywhere from Argonne National Labs to academic and professional institutions have done so in far greater depth and detail that I am likely to ever accomplish - but suffice it to say that even for someone tangentially involved in the carbon accounting aspects of the bio-renewables industry, I'm astounded by the way basic facts and empirical data are often assumed away. As a result, this is one real area that I would like to "teach the controversy," to use a very loaded phrase. This is a genuine effect and people are actively trying to measure it, but the partisan rants of the biofuels lobby and radical environmentalists aside, it is an area where there are a lot of smart people working but there is not enough evidence to decide on the overall magnitude either way.All this writing is starting to make my hands tired, but I wanted to talk about ILUC so much mostly because I think the science is definitely not mature enough to be included in any policies yet - basically, what we have are trumped-up Fermi estimates - and that the piece linked to in the question details is seriously overestimating any carbon emissions and land use change as a result. In fact, just today the California Air Resources Board has proposed reductions in its ILUC estimates for biofuels, which were inaugurated with much fanfare in 2009 but have turned out not to be supported by empirical data.So where does this leave us?First, let's not kid ourselves. Over the past 10 years much of the Borneo rainforest has been cut down, the Brazilian rainforest has been devastated and biofuels policies have contributed, especially in places with weak property rights, bad policy and insufficient protection for the environment. Any increase in first-generation biofuels is likely to continue many, though certainly not all of these trends. In addition to the environmental impacts, the linkages of major food crops to fuel have also arguably increased prices for these crops and definitely increased price volatility in developing nations. It's not quite as bad as anti-biofuel propagandists make it out to be, but it's definitely not good.Second, much of the environmental effects of a first-generation biofuels expansion from 2014-2024 would not happen the same way it did in 2004-2014. There are better policies in place, there is better awareness of the consequences of policies, and frankly government policymakers have learned from some (though certainly not all) of the flaws in early ethanol and biodiesel promotion schemes. And finally, of course, there are the unquantifiable effects of new technology to improve yields, change feedstocks, and perhaps kick first-generation feedstocks for good.Third, in my mind the empirical data bears out that biodiesel is a much more obvious culprit for environmental damage than ethanol. The ecosystems vulnerable to biodiesel crop exploitation are more productive and more valuable than in other regions. Unlike in Brazil (cane, soy, and ranching), the EU (rapeseed, wheat), or North America (corn and canola) there hasn't been a huge amount of agricultural intensification in palm oil, yield increases or effective governmental policy to prevent large amounts of land use change and consequent negative effects. Although the large players in palm oil have rapidly become more sustainable in response to Western demand, smallholders still operate unsustainable practices with impunity. In comparison, starch-based ethanol producers tend to be in North America or Western Europe and highly regulated, and cane ethanol has a very low impact in comparison to starch.By the way, near as I can tell, the expansion in first-generation biofuels outlined in the document from the question details isn't going to happen. The EU has recognized that such things have negative impacts and is now moving away from first-generation products.* In case you're wondering, field corn is not the same thing as sweet corn you find in supermarkets. Field corn is almost 100% used for feed for livestock or high-fructose corn syrup production; a miniscule fraction is made into directly human consumable products.

Executive summary:If you find working as a soil scientist, a reverse desertification specialist, a modern farming evangelist, or a governmental agricultural bureaucrat appealing, I suggest the next step is to read Scott Strough’s opus: Scott Strough's answer to How can we combat climate change?Details and other options:First, I suggest you change your goal from “reducing global carbon output” to “reducing global net carbon output”.This is a long answer, but hopefully it can provide potential career advice to a large number of concerned individuals.So, what does your goal actually mean? Humanity emits 9 gigatonnes per year of carbon in the form of CO2, so let's simplify your goal to either reduce emissions by ~100 megatonnes a year, or to increase sequestration by the same.One example solution that accomplished your goal is the replacement of incandescent light bulbs with LEDs. LEDs alone caused a 1.5% reduction in CO2 emissions in 2017[1] ! And the impact will increase as incandescent lights continue to be replaced globally. You're too late for LEDs…But there are a surprisingly large number of other ways to work on a 1% reduction in net emissions. I'm going to list the best known ways first:Work to see increased use of wind, solar, hydro, fission, or fusion! Believe it or not, a lot of serious players think fusion is truly coming and by 2030 could very easily meet your goal. What is needed is truly skilled engineers to figure out the remaining problems. Lockheed, as an example, has a large team of scientists and engineers working on bringing fusion to the marketplace.Solar and wind are of course already seeing strong rates of adoption, but there is a major problem. Energy storage, both at the multi-hour and multi-day duration. Elon Musk has pushed extremely large lithium-ion based batteries as the solution, but most knowledgeable observers think major additional breakthroughs in battery technology needed before the energy grid can be totally revamped. Development of cost effective large scale batteries would easily meet your 1% goal, but it isn't clear that it can be done!Work to accelerate the global coal to natural gas switch in power generation. A natural gas power plant produces about 50% less CO2 than a coal power plant. The US is pretty far down this road and has seen coal's percentage of power production drop from about 60% in 2005 to about 25% so far in 2018. For the US the switch has been triggered by economics. In the US it is cheaper in 2018 to produce power from gas than it is from coal. That is due to the fracking revolution in particular, but has been held up by a lack of pipelines to get the gas from the fields to the users. The best option in the US is to be an advocate for fracking and pipelines.Globally, the coal to natural gas transition depends on LNG (liquid natural gas) efficiency improvements and infrastructure build-out. This is already in the pipeline, so I can't think of how you can assist in accelerating this. Slightly over 300 million tonnes of LNG will be produced and shipped across the ocean in 2018. That's 10–15% of global natural gas production. The US alone has an additional 30–35 MTPA (million tonnes per annum) scheduled to come online in the next 2 years (2019/2020). A huge trigger for LNG's market increases has been due to ship builder's increased efficiency. Before 2000 almost all LNG tankers burned fuel oil to boil water to power a steam turbine, this was fairly inefficient. In the early 2000′s new builds were burning the LNG they carried instead of fuel oil, but there was no efficiency improvements related to that other than cheaper fuel. By 2010 new builds were typically using 4-stroke engines and using LNG to fuel the engines for a 33% drop in fuel consumption. Typical new builds being delivered in the 2018–2022 time frame are using more efficient 2-stroke engines and use 50% less fuel than a steam turbine design. Think of that, a 50% reduction in fuel consumption in just 20 years!Globally the non-LNG tanker fleet still relies almost exclusively on fuel oil for fuel. About 3.5 million barrels per day of fuel oil is consumed for maritime use. The IMO (international maritime organization) has put in place regulations which call for lower sulfur emissions starting in 2020. This will trigger a switch from fuel oil to diesel-like fuels for maritime use as of Jan 1, 2020. That is great for generic pollution, but does nothing for CO2 emissions. For economic reasons the shipping industry is slowly moving to LNG as a maritime fuel. The world's first LNG fueled cruise ship was delivered in summer 2018. The world's first LNG fueled oil tanker entered service summer 2018 as well. 2-stroke LNG fueled engines produce at least 30% less CO2 than conventional maritime engines. The market penetration of LNG fueled ships is still small but increasing; a career aimed at increasing the market penetration of LNG fueled ships would meet your goal.Globally another 4 million barrels per day of fuel oil is consumed for power generation. This doesn't produce significantly more CO2 than an coal based power plants, but the sulfur based pollution is horrible. A global effort to convert all of those plants from fuel oil to LNG fueled is needed. That is happening, but it is a slow process that appears to be taking decades. A career focused on accelerating that transition might meet your goal.Another option is advocating for use of UHVDC power transmission lines. Power transmission lines 500 miles long or longer are somewhat rare due to power losses in the transmission lines. Ultra High Voltage DC transmission lines overcome much of that and allow for much greater efficiency in large scale power distribution. At least for now UHVDC utilization is rare, especially in the US. A career advocating for UHVDC power distribution would meet your goal.The global trucking industry is slowly moving from diesel fueled to CNG/LNG fueled. China has over 300,000 LNG fueled trucks on the road. The US and EU are also seeing increased CNG/LNG fueled truck usage. As one example, Waste Management says 80% of their new collection truck purchases are for natural gas fueled trucks and already 30% of their 20,000 collection truck fleet is natural gas fueled. Natural gas fueled trucks historically have emitted 20% less CO2 than diesel fueled. A new generation natural gas truck engine (HPDIv2) has just come in the market and I believe offers better fuel economy and thus further reduced CO2 emissions. Some cities globally are restricting use of diesel fueled trucks in their downtowns. Some ports are doing the same thing for the trucks that carry freight in and out of the port. A career involving CNG/LNG fueled trucking would definitely meet your goal.RNG (renewable natural gas) builds on the trucking industries transition from diesel to CNG/LNG. For now RNG is “manufactured” by laying perforated pipes in landfills and collecting the naturally occurring landfill gas (aka biogas). The landfill gas is cleaned to pipeline gas standards and injected into the national natural gas pipeline network. In the US about 200 million gallons worth of diesel truck fuel was replaced with RNG in 2017. The US EPA certifies RNG derived from landfill gas as a 90% CO2 emissions reduction. That is by far the biggest CO2 emission reduction they have certified. Ethanol from corn as an example is certified merely as a “less than 20%” reduction. A career advancing RNG penetration could easily meet your goal.Many will say electric vehicles. With the current state of battery technology I just can't get enthused, so in my mind this comes back to working on battery technology again.Hydrogen fueled vehicles, is much more exciting to me. Lab tests have proven methane (CH4) bubbled through a 4-ft tall column of molten tin can break the molecular bonds and produce pure H2 and carbon black. Vaughan Pratt is very active on Quora and very involved in hydrogen fueled vehicle development. A career focused on hydrogen fueled vehicles can almost certainly meet your goal.There is also ongoing efforts to reduce the emissions from concrete. The production of new concrete is a very large source of CO2 emissions, especially in emerging economies where they are still building up there concrete based infrastructure. A career as a scientist focussed on reducing CO2 emissions from concrete can almost certainly meet your goal.I'm sure I have missed some well known options. If readers know of any I missed please feel free to propose edits.Now, let me step out of your self imposed box of a 1% goal and instead shoot for a 50+% reduction in net emissions by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere in the world's soil.Soil Carbon StorageFirst, remember your goal is to have approximately 100 megatonnes a year in impact. My proposal is you aim higher and go for a career in an area with a potential 5 gigatonnes per year or more impact.Why soil? First there is more carbon in soil than their is in the atmosphere and the global biosphere combined. That means a small percentage change in soil carbon has a magnified impact on the atmosphere.Soil: ~2500 gigatonnes of carbon embeddedAtmosphere: ~800 gigatonnes of carbon embedded in CO2Global plants and animals: ~560 gigatonnes carbon in the bodies/plant structureThus even a massive 5 gigatonnes a year increase in soil carbon is just a 0.2% per year increase in carbon embedded in soil. And the best way to add carbon to the soil is to pull it out of the atmosphere via plants.But lets drill down into that further. SOC (soil organic carbon) is the difference between dirt and soil. Note the word carbon in there. This Pennington grass literature nicely explains the difference: Mycorrhizal Fungi Creates Healthy Lawns. As recently as 25 years ago the information in that link was totally unknown to soil scientists. As recently as 1995, soil scientists simply did not understand how soil formation worked or what kept the nutrients from dissolving in the rain and ending up in the ocean.Farming practices as used for thousands of years kill off mycorrhizae fungi and deplete the soil of SOC (carbon). If continued generation after generation traditional farming turns land with rich topsoil into desert. A large part of today's deserts once had quality topsoil and native vegetation, but human farming has destroyed it.Roughly 1/3rd of global land is desert. Desert land is by definition infertile land that has no embedded SOC (ie. Carbon). It is not a realistic goal, but it would take at least 1250 gigatonnes of carbon to turn the world's deserts into grasslands. Note the unbelievably large goal I set is for 5 gigatonnes a year of carbon sequestration (50% of human annual CO2 emissions), so greening the desert efforts at a truly massive scale could continue for 250 years before running out of desert to restore!More realistically, if just 15% of the world's deserts could be restored to agricultural land, including pastures, it would require in excess of 5 gigatonnes per year of CO2 be pulled out of the air and injected into the soil for the next 37.5 years. Scientists now know how to do that[2], but it is going to take a lot of feet on the ground to make it happen.Efforts to “green the desert” are just getting underway globally and will last for decades. Here is one of the efforts using the latest soil science - http://greenthedesert.orgA very interesting features of this is that the goal of each individual desert greening project is to turn unusable land into profitable land. For now it could well be that efforts focus on working with native populations that have been pushed off the best land and given infertile/sterile land on which to live (ie. American Indian tribes).A career in reverse desertification could have numerous personal rewards and just happen to sequester stunningly large amounts of carbon in the process!Less extreme, the vast majority of farmed land globally is SOC (carbon) depleted and averages 30–50% depleted. 40% of the world's land is used for agriculture and 40% of that is farmed (the other 60% is pasture for grazing animals). If you do the math that is a 120–200 gigatonnes carbon deficiency in farmed land. Modern no-till farming techniques combined with continuous cover crop farming can restore the land to have healthy topsoil. Doing so at 5 gigatonnes a year (50% of annual human CO2 emissions) would provide a wonderful 24–40 years of large scale carbon sequestration. Much of the soil science to do this is already known. What is needed now are educational and governmental programs to globally change the way farming is done. Seeing a farmer use a plow or till needs to be turned into a social stigma as people realize that method of farming is raping the land out of sheer ignorance.If you find working as a soil scientist, a reverse desertification specialist, a modern farming evangelist, or a governmental agricultural bureaucrat appealing, I suggest the next step is to read Scott Strough’s opus: Scott Strough's answer to How can we combat climate change?Good luck and I hope I offered up some career options you hadn't thought of.Footnotes[1] LEDs Took Half a Billion Tons of Carbon Dioxide From the Sky in 2017, IHS Markit Says[2] https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb1144429.pdf

How trees help in preventing floodsTrees are one of the most important organisms that exist on planet Earth.Food for all living organisms originates from trees and other members in the plant kingdom. Every single organism depends directly or indirectly on trees for their survival. Trees not only provide food for other organisms, but also shelter and protection to many different types of organisms including humans. In addition, trees also provide wood, shade, oxygen and clean air. During heavy rains, trees reduce the risk of flooding. There are two major ways in which trees provide protection against flooding.Trees allow water to be drained into the groundExperts say that woodland acts as a barrier to floodwater, while trees also prevent soil erosion, reducing sediment going into rivers and increasing water absorption into the ground. This slows rainwater running off into swollen streams and helps lower peak flood levels.See how a tree aids ground water and prevents run off that can cause floodingTrees help prevent flooding. When plants grow in an area, the roots of plants dig deep in to the soil and create space between soil particles. When it rains in highlands, water that flows downhill gets drained into the space created by the root system of plants. Due to this, chance of flooding is greatly reduced. When plants are absent, especially in rocky areas, rocks prevent water from seeping into the ground. This phenomenon is also observed in paved roads. Since there is no room for water to seep, flooding occurs in nearby water bodies. When a layer of water runs off a rocky surface, it reduces friction and the following layers of water will run more freely as there is less friction. If more water is dumped into rivers and lakes than they can handle, these water bodies tend to overflow and the banks burst and cause flooding. If there are more trees in an area that is prone to water runoffs, the root system of trees can create space between these rocks and hence reduce the amount of water being dumped into lakes and rivers.See the lack of trees: trees act as storm water traps.When land is paved over or covered, by roads and roofs for example, it is like putting “Plastic Wrap” on top of the ground. Rain that would have soaked into the ground and recharged the groundwater now runs across the surface creating “storm water run-off” which must be collected, conveyed, and discharged to a receiving body, typically rivers. As more water is running off the earth than soaking into it, more water must fit into existing pipes. These pipes are not large enough to handle the increased flows, causing flooding and overwhelming our rivers with pollutants which make our waterways unsafe for swimming and the fish too toxic to eat. Trees put holes in the “Plastic Wrap” and allow rain to infiltrate into the ground and recharge groundwater rather than running off the surface.The influence of forests and forest alteration on water yield and timing is complex. Where forests were the original land cover, the protective effect consists in maintaining as far as possible the ‘natural’ flow regime, which inevitably consisted of both flooding and low flows to which stream channels and associated biota were adjusted. With human intervention and occupancy, there is a need for better understanding of the forest/water interaction. With regard to floods, it is now quite clear that forests reduce storm-flow peaks and delay them better than other land cover, but that this effect occurs close to a forest and diminishes further downstream in the watershed. On major rivers, headwater forests have little or no effect in reducing flood intensity in the downstream reaches. But close to the protective forest, the frequent, lower intensity storms are ameliorated more than with other land covers or land uses, to the benefit of local people.Healthy forests and wetland systems provide a host of watershed services, including water purification, ground water and surface flow regulation, erosion control, and stream bank stabilization. The importance of these watershed services will only increase as water quality becomes a critical issue around the globe. Their financial value becomes particularly apparent when the costs of protecting an ecosystem for improved water quality are compared with investments in new or improved infrastructure, such as purification plants and flood control structures – in many cases it is often cheaper and more efficient to invest in ecosystem management and protection.At Sustainable Green Initiative, we plant trees to help the fight against climate change and also hunger, poverty and rural migration. By planting a tree through us, you help in doing your bit to mitigate your carbon footprint and carry on the fight against hunger, poverty and climate change.Planting Fruit Trees Helps Combat Hunger, Poverty And Global Warming.Did you know a tree sequesters about 1 ton of carbon and processes enough oxygen for two peoples requirements in its life-time?So what are you waiting for? Plant a tree today.Trees can Reduce Floodsfor thousands of people across the UK, these names will evoke traumatic memories. They are the names of storms that hit the UK in the winters of 2015 and 2016. In December 2015 a succession of storms hit the north, flooding around 16,000 homes making this the wettest December in England for a century, and causing devastation across Scotland and northern England. Then in the first named storm of 2016, storm Angus caused huge rail disruptions and left over a thousand properties in the South West without power.With the severity and frequency of flooding events increasing, it is clear that we need to take preventative action. Human infrastructure such as buildings and roads, and land use with compact soils such as cropland, are much less permeable than natural land covers. As a result, water runs over these surfaces more quickly, taking topsoil with it, and enters rivers which end up bursting their banks. Or surface water flooding occurs as rain water cannot easily penetrate the ground. Nature, however, can be part of the solution.NATURAL FLOOD MANAGEMENTNatural flood management (NFM) is the alteration, restoration or use of landscape features to reduce flood risk. Trees, hedgerows and woods are a vital part of natural flood management, and strategic planting can have a positive impact in areas experiencing floods from rivers and surface water.HOW TREES REDUCE FLOODSThere are a number of ways trees can help to reduce or prevent flooding:By direct interception of rainfall,By promoting higher soil infiltration rates,Through greater water useThrough greater ‘hydraulic roughness’ i.e. water experiences increased frictional resistance when passing over land.Direct interception of rainfallRainfall is intercepted by the canopy of a tree and later evaporates from the leaves or drips from leaf surfaces and flows down the truck to eventually infiltrate the soil.Higher soil infiltration ratesWater penetrates more quickly and more deeply into soils under and around trees than on, for example, lawn or pasture without trees. Tree roots create channels in the soil known as ‘macropores’, and water from heavy rain will infiltrate the soil using these channels rather than flowing over the surface and leading to floods. In compacted soils, tree roots have been shown to improve infiltration by 153% compared with unplanted controls.Water useTrees remove water from the catchment area leading to a significant reduction in pressure on drainage systems in urban areas and a reduction in flood risk in rural areas by absorbing runoff from roads and agricultural areas.Hydraulic roughnessTrees, shrubs and deadwood along streamsides and on floodplains act as a drag on flood waters, holding back water and slowing the flow during heavy rainfall.So the basic takeaway is that trees reduce the amount of runoff and water is released more slowly into water bodies.EFFECTIVE RESULTSScientists have begun to measure how effective trees and wooded areas are at reducing flood risk, and the results are astounding. A multi-scale experiment, the Pontbren Project in Wales, showed that sheep-free plots planted with broadleaved trees were on average 67 times more effective at absorbing surface runoff than grazed grassland. Evidence from a number of studies indicate that tree planting can significantly reduce peak flood flows, flow volumes and time to peak at small scales (within plots, fields and very small catchments), although this effect diminishes as the scale of the catchment increases.As trees deliver clear benefits for flood reduction, and provide multiple other ecosystem services, we need government investment in natural flood management and a clear commitment to tree planting. The Woodland Trust is working with landowners and communities to deliver tree planting as part of natural flood management schemes, and lobbies government to assess the potential for NFM and to incentivise woodland creation to deliver more resilient landscapes.