Supporting Deep Roots to Combat Climate Change
Deep roots stabilize the soil around them, protecting sloped areas from landslides and erosion, and they can also break up bedrock. All of these things make roots foundational to forest ecosystems, allowing other plants to grow. In fact, trees completely changed the planet forever when they showed up around 400 million years ago in the Devonian period. Not only do they keep plants fed and watered, they can also make it easier for water and nutrients to stay in the soil.
Roots can also contribute to reducing climate change as a whole, by taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in the soil. The carbon that plants use to make sugar in photosynthesis comes straight from the air in the form of CO2, and much of that gets incorporated into the plant’s biomass. And in plants with fairly extensive root systems, much of that biomass is underground, where it isn’t in contact with the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, like everything else, roots are changing. Not all roots are created equal. Some plants, like trees and other woody plants, have deep and extensive root systems, while other plants, like the crops that we grow to eat, tend to have a shallower root system. And because we’ve converted so much forest land into farmland, we’ve changed the distribution of plants across the globe, basically making it so that the proportion of shallow-rooted crop plants is much higher than it otherwise would be.
This is why Wren, a website with a monthly subscription that helps fund projects to combat the climate crisis, is so important. By making a monthly contribution, you can help support projects like rainforest protection programs and help restore the planet’s roots. Click the link in the description to learn more. It has been recently discovered that Earth has lost 5% of its total root volume. The effect of this is still unknown, but it is known that soil water storage is dependent upon root depth and that soils already contain very little water. In the next hundred years, this trend is likely to continue regardless of how the climate crisis plays out. Models predict that the Earth could lose up to 32.4 trillion cubic meters of rooted soil by 2100, which is almost three times more than we’ve lost already, and equates to 23 centimeters of root depth all over the world. In the most optimistic scenarios, root depths decrease even more, by up to 43.5 trillion cubic meters or 30 centimeters globally. This is due to land-use change being more connected to root depth than climate change. Reducing the amount of land used for agriculture and reducing meat consumption can help reverse these trends. Reforestation can also help restore roots, and these steps can help with climate change as well. Wren is a website that funds projects to combat the climate crisis and provides an onramp to climate action for those who want to help our planet but don’t know where to start. This month, Wren has joined the fight against the global climate crisis by destroying harmful refrigerants to protect the ozone layer. A few years ago, the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere was a major topic of conversation. Wren is now taking action! You can join them by signing up to make a monthly contribution at wren.co. Plus, the first 100 SciShow viewers who sign up with the link in the description will receive their first month of subscription for free. [♪ OUTRO]