Good luck reverses global forest loss »

The amount of vegetation globally has increased by the equivalent of almost four billion tonnes of carbon since 2003 despite large-scale deforestation in the tropics, a new analysis of 20 years of satellite data has found. An Australian-led international team of scientists published the findings , finding a range of causes for the increase. "The increase in vegetation primarily came from a lucky combination of environmental and economic factors and massive tree-planting projects in China," said Dr Yi Liu a lead author and remote sensing scientist from the Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. "Vegetation increased on the savannas in Australia, Africa and South America as a result of increasing rainfall, while in Russia and former Soviet republics we have seen the regrowth of forests on abandoned farmland. "China was the only country to intentionally increase its vegetation with tree planting projects." At the same time massive vegetation loss is still occurring in many other regions. The greatest declines have been on the edge of the Amazon forests and in the Indonesian provinces of Sumatra and Kalimantan - the Indonesian part of Borneo. To get their results the team pioneered an entirely new technique to map changes in vegetation biomass over time, using satellite measurements of natural radio waves emitted from the Earth's surface.