Have you ever wondered How many trees are there in the world? Numbers are a very large abstraction that we are able to understand only in moderate amounts. Thus, for example, we have the notion of how many are ten fingers, because we can just visualize them. The same goes for slightly larger numbers, so we can also imagine a hundred people.
But what happens when we raise the ante? If we raise the level and ask to imagine, for example, 500 thousand stars, things get a bit complicated. Quantities such as the number of stars in the universe or the grains of sand present on Earth are simply impossible to imagine due to the difficulty of abstraction. Well now, we must add another element to the impossible abstraction; the number of trees on Earth.
A group of scientists asked the question: How many trees are there on Earth? Getting to the answer was not easy at all. The team led by Thomas Crowther While working on a project at Yale University, he set out to figure out the number of trees on our planet.
The impossible abstract
Initially, an estimate was made based on satellite images. According to this methodology, there is a density of trees on Earth of 400 billion. However, there is another estimate based on measurements verified on the ground, which says that in the Amazon basin alone there are 390 billion.
The figures do not add up, the scientists were clearly facing a failure of argument in the methodologies used. To refine the numbers, Crowther and his team relied on detailed forest inventories that have been produced by various countries.
Collecting all the information, about 400 thousand forest diagrams, they meticulously processed the data with complex calculations. Crowther, whose research was published in the journal Nature, eventually came up with a staggering number of three billion trees living in the world.
There are three billion trees in the world
According to this staggering estimate, there are 422 trees per person in the world. But this does not mean that we should plead, on the contrary, the figure should invite us to reflect on the atrocities to which we subject our forests. Unfortunately Every year about 15,000 million trees are felled throughout the planet.
Perhaps it could be thought that there is not much that we can do on this scale. However, small actions can lead to big changes. Responsible consumption, as well as reuse and recycling help enormously to take care of our planet. We have three billion trees to take care of.
It might interest you