hello wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be talking
about our planet Earth and about trees because in this video I'm joining the
#teamtrees and my goal in this video is to show you something that
China has been doing that we really need to consider doing as well and for this
reason without further ado let's talk about this and welcome to whatdamath
now in case you decide to switch this video to something else well maybe first
consider supporting teamtrees.org this is a collaboration between thousands of
youtubers and our goal is to literally try to plant 20 million trees by January
of 2020 and since this is such a challenging goal we're basically going
to be asking these guys to help us this is a charity whose only goal is to
literally plant trees for every dollar we donate they're going to plant a tree
so we need to try to raise 20 million dollars in a couple of months and since
so many different influences are literally coming all together for this
particular event I'm actually excited to be part of this although just like so
many other influencers I'm also going to be planting trees and possibly post it on
Twitter or Instagram later on but because I wanted to make this video
educational and also interesting I really wanted to talk about what China
has been doing and this is going to really blow your mind because even
though China has been getting a lot of negative press lately there's one thing
that they've been really kicking our butts in and that's social engineering
projects specifically projects to improve nature and to improve
environmental conditions and although officially this started back in the 70s
it really didn't pick up until a decade or so ago and here you can see the
reasons why China decided to do all of this this huge cloud you see that covers
this really big part of China this is pollution the pollution in China became
so insanely high and affected so many people that they really decided to kind
of implement official policies to fight it and one of those policies was
literally planting more trees now I actually made a video about all of
this a few months ago and you can check it out somewhere above my head but in a
nutshell what nasa has discovered by looking at various maps of various parts
of the world is that for some reason India and China have actually been
turning more green over time and with India we realized that it was most
likely due to various crop plantations but with China it was a very different
story it was actually forests a war of forests huge amounts of forests and
remember how I mentioned that as influencers our goal is to try to plan
20 million trees in the next two months well just to give you a comparison our
unofficial competitor China has actually been quite successful
in planting about 12 to 13 billion trees per year that's billion that's not
million and for a very long time just like NASA I was actually kind of
confused how they managed to pull it off mostly because it's very very difficult
to get any kind of information out of China because unlike the US government
or really most of the other governments you can think of China doesn't really
like advertising things they don't really tell us what's happening so after
a relatively thorough research and actually visiting China a few times I
finally figured out what they did and how they did it and there are three
major things I wanted to mention in this video and all of them are kind of cool
so first of all when the pollution things happened in China it was for the
most part in the so-called Hebei province I'm sure I'm mispronouncing but
basically it's kind of right here which is really ironic because living in South
Korea I'm often affected by this a lot of the pollution from this province
actually comes to the east of the country and it does unfortunately hit
Korea quite a lot and we do experience a lot of pollution days because of the
Chinese emissions and although officially this is the image that Hebei
province always had and this is the image China was trying to create the
reality was a little bit different there were a lot of factories a lot of
pollution and all of this was basically creating a huge concern for the entire
country so to fight this China that's something
that no one else could they took all disorders in the North and told them to
go and plant trees a lot of trees millions and millions of trees you can read more
about this in the article below but this is essentially what NASA discovered as
well there was a sudden increase in the north part of China where suddenly there
was a lot of greenery everywhere and even though this hasn't really stopped
the pollution just yet it has decreased it quite dramatically but this didn't
explain everything there were a lot of other patches around China that also got
green and I needed to figure this out by doing a little bit more research and so
China actually helped me a little bit they released the video very recently
promoting their successes across the so-called inner mongolia
this is the really green part you see right here and in this video they show
us that they initiated an extremely large engineering
project it's bigger than anything anyone has ever done and in this project their
goal is to turn desert into an actual forest now there is a problem with this
one is that it's actually a little bit difficult to do this without affecting a
lot of other things in the environment but they're really actually trying this
and they've been partially successful there are a lot of problems they have to
solve and there's actually quite a lot of things they have to overcome but in
the last few years I've actually heard only good things although some people
say that it's only the beginning there still may be a lot of things that can go
wrong specifically because a lot of the trees that are being planted are going
to decrease total amount of water in those areas but nevertheless this is an
impressive project so impressive as a matter of fact that I think I would like
to go there in a few years just to see this for myself but just this video alone
kind of gives you an idea that something really crazy is happening there and
they've actually been able to I guess you can code greenify a huge part of the
desert now compared to this project here it's actually a huge undertaking not
only because it requires a lot of manpower but because it requires
technology that is only being developed today it's something that no one has
ever tried or attempted on such huge scales because in order for trees to
grow in a desert you have to find a system or create a system where water
can be delivered and all of this has to function really well you can check out
this amazing video that Smithsonian made about all of this it's also in the
description below although before we go on I have to also kind of warn you you
have to take all of this with a grain of salt
remember all of these videos are coming out of the Chinese government these are
not independent reports reports created by independent journalists unfortunately
all of this is government I guess you can call it propaganda but in this case
at least one proof exists coming out of NASA because as I mentioned before we
have seen the parts of China becoming more green over time and interestingly
for the Inner Mongolia um the main part of this project is actually to stop the
encroachment of desert in other words to stop the desert from growing
their goal is to shrink it and they've been quite successful it apparently
already has shrunk by several percent and they even have a name for this
program and obviously they decided to name this the great green wall of China
and although there have been quite a lot of failures in this program it has been
overall quite successful to the point where China has even suggested that
they're going to share all this technology with the nearby Central Asian
countries in other words they're actually going to be sharing this
technology with pretty much everyone else living in the same desert and even
though some scientists suggested that because of the type of trees that have
been planted it might not really have a really long-term effect or it might
actually kind of retract again and turn into a desert over time right now
the Chinese deserts have been shrinking by about 2,400 square kilometers per
year that is a huge amount just to give a comparison here's the map of the US
with little squares each of them representing roughly around 2,400
kilometers and that's literally like turning each one of these squares into a
forest every single year and their eventual goal is to increase the total
coverage of forests in China by about 35% in total that's actually quite a lot
considering the size of China it's the third largest country in the world but
people being people not everything is of course perfect one thing I was able to
discover is that in some parts of China farmers came up with a very interesting
scheme they would actually cut down all the existing trees just to plant new
trees and get the government money or the government grant that's given for
planting trees in other words they destroy the environment just to create a
new environment that might not really survive and so some of these scientists
in China suggested that instead of trying to replant trees maybe a better
effort should be done to preserve what's already there and to encourage growth in
the environment that already exists which is not really done right now at
the same time several studies including this one that you can find in the
description below suggest that China is being way too aggressive about
this to the point where it's very likely going to dry out a lot of areas nearby
and actually have a negative effect rather than having a positive effect and
this was actually published by Chinese researchers
that suggested that this whole aggressive planting tree technique
might end up warming up the planet and also dry out a lot of areas that would
need this water otherwise which actually has already been suggested by some of
the studies that discover that even though China is losing his deserts it's
gaining a lot of semi-arid areas essentially areas that are a little bit
drier than usual but I guess only time will show us what's going to happen but
there's one more thing I wanted to talk about because China is also invested
into something that I've never really seen before literally a city of trees a
tree City a few years ago someone in China decided to try to invite this
Italian architect I believe his name is Stefano *Boeri Architetti who created this
beautiful apartment building somewhere in Italy that has quite a lot of
greenery and a lot of trees on it and the Chinese government gave him quite a
lot of money to try to take this to the next level and this is actually one
place that I really want to visit sometime next year in 2020 they're going
to be opening this up this is known as Liuzhou forest city and upon completion
it's going to house about 30,000 people so it's not really a big city but it's
going to be totally self sustainable while at the same time being very
environmentally friendly producing absolutely no pollution and actually
even decreasing pollution over time in the areas nearby now there are
unfortunately no real photos from this location yet and as a matter of fact I
don't believe anyone can even visit it yet but I'm really excited to try going
there once it opens up the actual project and the entire concept behind it
is absolutely brilliant now whether it's going to work is of course another
question but if anyone can pull it off is going to be China because it
definitely takes a load of central organization here to make this work and
hopefully sometime next year I'll get to visit this place take a lot of pictures
make a video and possibly meet the residents you never know and if you want
to learn more about this project this is also in a description below so when it
comes to planting trees China has definitely been kicking our butts
which is why I'm super excited to be part of team trees and to try to
encourage you to go to the website below and potentially donate something
anything but better even go out there find a
place to plant a tree and do so yourself because even though I guess it's great
that we're supporting a charity it's even more great to do so yourself and to
put actual effort in preserving our nature preserving the environment and
making the future much better for our kids our grandkids and everyone else
after that now unfortunately even after this
campaign were still going to be far far behind what China has achieved as a
matter of fact the amount of trees were planting now or trying to plant now is
only about 0.1% of the annual tree plantation in China but if
we can succeed this year next year let's take it to the next level and then
another level let's basically show China how it's
really done anyway on that note thank you for watching check out all the links
I mentioned in the description below and I really highly encourage you to go and
check out the charity we're supporting well at the same time maybe consider
planting the tree out there I'm gonna try to make a video sometime in the
future where I do that myself as well unfortunately it's getting really cold
outside so I couldn't really do it this week but you know my mom always told me
stop making excuses and go and make it work anyway or not note thank you so
much for watching subscribe it is - haven't sure this was someone who
actually share this with everyone you know what shared us with absolutely
everyone because everyone needs to know about this and come back tomorrow to
learn something else I'll see you guys tomorrow space out and as always bye bye