Restoring Forests the Right Way

1 Planting trees is a way to bring back forests. But it has to be done the right way.
2 Aadya Joshi looks across a landscape near Mumbai, India. She sees eucalyptus trees. They were planted to replace a forest. It was cleared for timber.
3 Joshi is not happy. Eucalyptus trees don’t grow naturally in the area, she says. Native trees should have been planted. Only they could bring back the biodiversity that once was there.
4 Biodiversity is the variety of living things in a habitat or ecosystem. An environment needs diversity to stay balanced. For example, insects carry pollen. Plants need pollen to make seeds. These seeds grow plants that provide food for insects. Insects become food for frogs.
5 “You can’t plant something that doesn’t fit into an ecosystem and expect the ecosystem to function,” she told TIME for Kids.
6 Joshi is the founder of The Right Green. The group teaches people about growing native trees. Once, Earth was home to 6 trillion trees. Now there are about 3 trillion. Planting new trees to replace those that have been lost “sounds like a good idea,” Joshi says. “But what people are doing in many places is not restoring forests. They’re just replanting. There’s a big difference.” 
7 Trees are important to the health of the planet. They help clean the air. They’re also a source of food and medicine. But 46% of the world’s trees have been cut down. This is done for businesses such as cattle farming and paper making.
8 Some efforts to replant trees make things worse. This happened in Chile, in South America. Big companies cut down forests for timber. They replanted in the 1970s using the wrong kinds of trees. They created tree plantations. “They’re not really what we imagine a forest to be,” Robert Heilmayr says. “These trees are more like a crop.”
9 Heilmayr is a professor of environmental economics. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He says tree plantations might make soil erosion worse. And they’re not as good as forests are at removing carbon dioxide from the air. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. This means that too much of it can cause Earth's temperature to rise. This can make climate change worse.
10 Today, Chile’s government pays small landowners to plant native trees. Heilmayr says this kind of approach to forest restoration “is really productive.” 

Prompt
ESSAY: Write your essay in the empty box below. 



Read the selection Restoring Forests. 



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Explain how planting native trees is important to restoring forests. 



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use evidence from the selection in your response 

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review the selection 

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