Fears of global warming and its impact on our environment have left scientists scrambling to decrease levels of atmospheric carbon we humans produce. Now, Tel Aviv University researchers are doing their part to reduce humanity's carbon footprint by successfully growing forests in the most unlikely place deep in Israel's Aravah Desert.
With environmental "extras" such as a local plant species, recycled sewage water unsuitable for agriculture, and arid lands unusable for crops, a group of researchers including Profs. Amram Eshel and Aviah Zilberstein of TAU's Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants at the George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences and the university's new Renewable Energy Center have discovered a winning combination.
In many parts of the world, including areas of India, central Asia and the Sahara desert, their new crop of plants would be not only viable in difficult terrain, but valuable in terms of carbon reduction. These standing crops, grown on land once considered barren, can soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into oxygen. Their research is soon to be published in the European Journal of Plant Science and Biotechnology.
Making the desert bloom
Though maintaining our current forests is a necessary initiative, Prof. Eshel says, it is not enough to off-set human carbon output. In their quest to create forests that diminish carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, many countries have been converting fertile agricultural lands into forests. But TAU researchers believed that encouraging growth on a piece of land that was traditionally barren, such as desert land, was a step in a better direction.
"When you take the overall carbon balance of converting agricultural land and freshwater into energy products, you may not gain that much," says Prof. Eshel. "You're investing a lot of energy in the process itself, thus releasing a lot of carbon into the atmospher
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| Contact: George Hunka ghunka@aftau.org 212-742-9070 American Friends of Tel Aviv University Source:Eurekalert |
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