Since the 1940s, the world has lost half of its mangrove forests. In Colombia, a stretch of coastline where the trees grow now has an unlikely champion: Apple is investing an undisclosed amount to protect and restore mangroves in a 27,000-acre forest. “These forests are critical because they’re one of nature’s most important tools in the battle against climate change–they can absorb and store up to ten times more carbon than a terrestrial forest,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives told an audience at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco today. [Photo: Conservation International] The project, which will involve both planting trees in degraded areas and preserving the trees that still exist, will help capture an estimated 1 million metric tons of CO2 emissions over its lifetime. In its first two years, it will reduce emissions around 17,000 metric tons–roughly the same amount as the emissions from the cars that will update Apple Maps over the next decade, making the program carbon neutral for the company. Mangrove trees “have the densest carbon storage of any habitat on Earth,” says M. Sanjayan, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Conservation International, which partnered with […]
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