Community Carbon Link Factsheet on trees and carbon

Quiz Questions:

Why is it good to plant trees?
Can you name any kinds of trees?
Think about an ash tree. How many seeds does it make?
What do we get from trees?
Where does the wood in trees actually come?
What is climate change and where does it come from?
Can we do anything about climate change?
What is the atmosphere and where did it come from?
What do you know about the rain forests?
When you turn on the light at home, where does that energy come from?

   Some amazing facts about trees and climate change

1. The great thing about trees is that they eat CO2 for breakfast! In fact they absorb it all day long and store it away as this wonderful stuff that we call wood.
2. The problem is that we have lost lots of our trees so we need to get more.
3. One ash tree can make 2 million baby ash tree seeds in a year!
4. Trees make oxygen for us to breathe. How long can you survive without breathing?
5. Every year us humans make about 32 billion tonnes of CO2. This stuff weighs about the same as 32,000,000,000 big cars!
6. Luckily, our forests are doing a great job of cleaning up this mess for us. They absorb nearly a quarter of what we make each year. Thanks forests!
7. Trees can turn our CO2 into really useful stuff like – paper, apples, window frames, medicines and even maple syrup and chocolate. Yum Yum!

             
      For Teachers

The Lampeter/Bore Community Carbon link aims to link Lampeter and West Wales with the community of Bore (pronounced Boray) in Kenya.  Wales has a very high per capita carbon footprint (12th highest in the world) and because we have been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, we have a particular responsibility to do what we can to compensate for our share of the damage.
     

Unfortunately, it is the poor communities of tropical Africa that are bearing the brunt of the climatic changes that we have helped to create. As global temperatures rise the Sahara is moving south making it harder for these people to survive, year by year.
     

The latest research indicates that we get the greatest ‘cooling effect’ from trees and forests located by The Equator and the Stern Report (2006) clearly identified the protection of the tropical forests as priority number one in addressing climate change. For these reasons, it makes very good sense for us to focus on planting trees and protecting forest in Tropical latitudes.

The Lampeter/Bore Community Carbon Link is a new initiative funded by the Welsh Assembly Governments’ Gold Star Communities Scheme that aims to encourage all sectors of the community to reduce their carbon footprint by sponsoring the planting of cashew nut trees with the partner community in Kenya. As they grow, these trees withdraw carbon from the air, reduce desertification and produce a high-protein cash crop that gives the farmers an alternative to their current staple income of cutting down their existing forest to make charcoal.
     

Each cashew tree can be sponsored for £2.50 all of which goes out to the Kenyan community.

Lampeter/Bore Community Carbon Link is also a flagship project within the ‘Size of Wales’ Scheme. This is a Wales-wide national initiative that aims to protect 2 million hectares of tropical forest in Africa.

More information:

Email  -   ruhartwell@googlemail.com