As Christmas approaches and Christmas trees come down, Earthwatch offers the opportunity to sponsor the planting of a new tree with the Tiny Forest initiative.

Earthwatch Europe’s Tiny Forest initiative is devoted to increasing biodiversity and enabling people to reconnect with nature through citizen science. Since planting the first forest in 2020, the movement has grown to almost 150 forests, resulting in increased biodiversity and carbon storage.

There have been some reports to suggest that when poorly planned or managed, planting trees can actually do more harm than good. This can happen when trees are being planted with the express purpose of carbon storage to offset (抵消) carbon emissions by, for example, big companies—the trees planted for this purpose aren’t always native species. The planting of nonnative trees can lead to monocultures (单种栽培) that cannot support life.

Biodiversity needs to be a key consideration for reforestation, but this doesn’t offer the financial return s of planting for carbon storage or timber (木材) markets, so it can often fall by the wayside.

It is estimated that 50-60 million Christmas trees are produced and cut in Europe annually. In the run-up to Christmas, Earthwatch’s Sponsor a Sapling campaign offers the chance to sponsor the planting of a tree for £8.

Josh Kubale, Senior Communications Manager at Earthwatch, says, “We’re delighted with the Tiny Forest Sponsor a Sapling campaign, which will help people engage with what we’re doing at Tiny Forest and gives the option of an alternative and environmentally conscious Christmas present, As well as being a great Christmas gift, the campaign will help to fun d Earthwatch’s work across all our programmes. We’ve now planted 160 Tiny Forests and as we celebrate our third anniversary, we hope to plant many more!”

A great deal of personal protective equipment （PPE）— for example, disposable masks, rubber gloves — has been used since the pandemic began. It is estimated that medical waste, including masks which take 450 years to decompose （分解）in nature, has increased by 60 percent during the pandemic. A survey by Indonesian Institute of Sciences （LIPI） Research Centre found that masks and other healthcare garbage made up 16 percent of the total floating in the Cilincing and Marunda river in Jakarta Bay in March and April last year. Finding ways to change this is top of mind for some researchers.

The team at LIPI is experimenting with the disposable masks containing polypropylene （聚丙烯）a type of plastic that is tough but stretchable, which makes good raw material to produce various plastic products. At RMIT university in Melbourne, Australia, researchers are making a mix of mask pellets （颗粒），which help to add hardness and strength, and process building rubble （砾石）designed to be used for base layer of roads and pavements. One kilometer of a two-lane road will use around 3 million masks, preventing 93 tons of waste from going to landfill.

For the broader demand in mask recycling, TerraCycle, a waste management and recycling company, offers a Zero Waste Box that works like a recycling bin for used safety and protective equipment. Waste from hospital and medical centers is not included. The box comes with prepaid return label. Once full, it can be sent back to the company. All Zero Waste Boxes are quarantined（隔离）on arrival for a minimum of 72 hours to protect the workers handling the waste, separating the collected waste into fibers and plastics mechanically or manually. At last they will be transported to the company’s various third-party partners to manufacture a variety of new products including outdoor furniture, watering cans and storage containers, etc.

“To adopt the new recycling methods on a large scale would require a steady supply of waste masks in order to keep the machine running”, an official from the Plastic Recycling Association said, “but this never means those innovations are white elephants.”

The Children’s Climate Prize (CCP) was started by the Swedish company Telge Energi. It’s been given every year since 2016 to teens who have made “extraordinary efforts” to improve life on the planet now and in the future. Here are some of CCP finalists this year:

Reshma Kosaraju, a 15-year-old girl from Saratoga, California, the USA. She built her deep learning model by using weather information like temperature, humidity, wind speed, and how dry the soil is. Her model can predict where and when forest fires are most likely to happen. She hopes to turn her program into an app that’ll be useful to firefighters.

Fernanda Barros, a 16 year old girl from Pará, Brazil. She helped start the group Fridays For Future Amazonia (FFFA), which is working to protect Brazil’s Amazon rainforest that is seriously threatened. Fernanda says, “We have the science, we have team effort, and we won’t stop!”

Anjali Sharma, a 17-year-old girl from Melbourne, Australia. She was named a finalist for taking Australia’s Environment Minister to court in an attempt to stop a coal mine from being expanded. The case resulted in the court saying that the government had a “duty of care” to protect young people.

Lesein Mutunkei, a 17-year-old boy from Nairobi, Kenya. His project is called Trees For Goals, which encourages soccer teams to plant 11 trees for every goal scored. Already, over 1, 500 trees have been planted, and Lesein is working to spread the idea further. He’d really like to get the soccer group FIFA to back the idea.