After Antarctica, Australia is the driest continent. Large parts of the interior are hardly inhabitable. And climate change is progressing. Environmentalists are trying to turn destroyed landscapes green again.
Sydney – Red sand, endless outback landscapes, in the middle of the iconic rock block Uluru: The interior of Australia fascinates and makes long-distance travelers from all over the world curious. But for the country and its inhabitants, the dry center is a real challenge.
Because of the harsh living conditions, it is sparsely populated. According to a 2016 statistic, 85 percent of Australians live within 50 kilometers of the coast. Because in the so-called outback, which makes up 70 percent of Australia, desert-like conditions with temperatures of over 40 degrees can prevail.
Environmentalists and companies are therefore concerned with the question of whether the red continent can at least partially turn green again using modern technologies in order to defy the worst consequences of climate change. Droughts, devastating fires, record temperatures, floods – people and animals are constantly confronted with new disasters. There were particularly devastating bushfires in the Australian summer of 2019/2020.
Plant trees with drones
The young Australian company AirSeed now wants to plant millions of trees by 2024 – from the air. Namely, where fires and clearing have severely attacked the vegetation. The company, founded in 2019, works with ecologists to create planting patterns and produce capsules containing seeds and nutrients, which are then dropped from drones over a selected area. “Our main task is to restore lost biodiversity by planting native tree, shrub and grass species,” said Managing Director Andrew Walker of the German Press Agency. “Everything we plant must benefit the local ecosystems.”
A drone can reach the most remote areas. “Our approach is about 25 times faster and 80 percent more cost-effective than manual planting methods,” Walker said. To date, AirSeed has planted 150,000 trees in this way, and hundreds of thousands more are to follow in the coming months.
Reforest Now is also committed to reforestation – however, the organization is not dedicated to the outback, but to parts of the rainforest in the tropical north and in the subtropical north-east of the country. “We don’t do this because it’s easy, but because we live on the driest continent in the world and reforestation is urgently needed,” the website says.
Organization wants to build network of seed collectors
The work of Greening Australia, a non-profit company that has been in existence for 40 years, is broader. With projects ranging from restoring devastated outback habitats to protecting the Great Barrier Reef and greening cities, the organization aims to achieve its vision of “healthy and productive landscapes where people and nature thrive”. Among other things, the environmentalists want to build a national network of seed collectors and at the same time look for new ways to produce native seeds.
But the climatic conditions are difficult and hardly calculable. “Australia is a dry continent. Rainfall is coming in large amounts but at unpredictable times,” says Glenda Wardle, Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Sydney. “There are many dry years and then a lot of rain. So from bad conditions you come to sudden opportunities that are green.”
But the scientist – who heads a research group on desert ecology – is skeptical about permanent greening of arid and semi-arid outback areas. “It’s probably a misconception that Australia can be artificially greened permanently,” she says. “There is rainwater and groundwater, but resources are limited. To keep a desert green you would need a constant supply – and there isn’t one.”
Nevertheless, it is a good idea to “replant” destroyed regions “with similar native species and in a similar density”. However, afforestation is not always the right solution: “We shouldn’t plant forests in places where they don’t belong,” says Wardle. Rather, it must be ensured that no other regions are cut down or otherwise modified.
Organization buys particularly endangered ecosystems
The organization Bush Heritage Australia is committed to preserving endangered land. It was founded in 1991 by Green politician Bob Brown with the aim of buying and preserving particularly endangered ecosystems. In the meantime, 39 reserves with a total area of 1.2 million hectares have already been acquired. In addition, the organization works with indigenous and other landowners to help protect millions more hectares of land.
“We have a few national parks and nature reserves, but there are still too many landscapes that are not protected at all or are not protected enough,” says ecologist Anke Frank. The German lives and works on one of the protected lands – the 233,000-hectare Pilungah Reservation in Queensland’s Simpson Desert, traditionally owned by the Wangkamadla Aborigines.
For example, the spinifex grasses that grow in a circle and are widespread in arid regions are protected here. “The grass offers a lot of protection,” says Anke Frank. “It’s very prickly and predators have a problem catching animals underneath it.” The expert is convinced: afforestation in the wrong place can mess up an ecosystem – or even destroy it. dpa
