Huge "regreening" efforts in China over the past few decades have activated the country's water cycle and moved water in ways that scientists are just now starting to understand.
With all due respect to Dr Staal and the author, it seems like some pretty big journalistic liberties were taken in translating the research.
This has important implications for water management, because China’s water is already unevenly distributed. The north has about 20% of the country’s water but is home to 46% of the population and 60% of the arable land, according to the study. The Chinese government is trying to address this; however, the measures will likely fail if water redistribution due to regreening isn’t taken into account, Staal and his colleagues argued.
This conclusion seems like a massive extrapolation from the available data, and what was stated earlier in the article. There are so many other conflating factors that come into play with a landscape scale restoration - that “water redistribution due to regreening” is hardly critical.
Ecosystem restoration and afforestation in other countries could be affecting water cycles there, too. “From a water resources point of view, we need to see case-by-case whether certain land cover changes are beneficial or not,” Staal said. “It depends among other things on how much and where the water that goes into the atmosphere comes down again as precipitation.”
This whole paragraph makes me feel like I’m having a stroke. First sentence states an obvious truism. Second sentence is just wrong, there’s really no “case-by-case” on implementation of ecosystem restoration and green infrastructure. Land management is either in balance with the natural, dynamic process allowing for a resilient ecosystem; or it’s not, and everything suffers. Final sentence is just kind of funny - makes me think of if John Madden were a hydrologist- it’s right but obvious.
Dang it’s rare to have a pop science article in a niche I study- kinda fun
With all due respect to Dr Staal and the author, it seems like some pretty big journalistic liberties were taken in translating the research.
This conclusion seems like a massive extrapolation from the available data, and what was stated earlier in the article. There are so many other conflating factors that come into play with a landscape scale restoration - that “water redistribution due to regreening” is hardly critical.
This whole paragraph makes me feel like I’m having a stroke. First sentence states an obvious truism. Second sentence is just wrong, there’s really no “case-by-case” on implementation of ecosystem restoration and green infrastructure. Land management is either in balance with the natural, dynamic process allowing for a resilient ecosystem; or it’s not, and everything suffers. Final sentence is just kind of funny - makes me think of if John Madden were a hydrologist- it’s right but obvious.
Dang it’s rare to have a pop science article in a niche I study- kinda fun