Ecology
Good news for the environment and for sugar cane farmers is that the “tasty herb” cools the local climate by almost a degree.
It reflects more sunlight and evaporates more moisture than other crops, according to a new study.
“This is potentially a win-win culture for the climate. Using sugar cane as fuel for vehicles reduces carbon dioxide emissions, and growing as a crop lowers air temperature,” said an ecologist and one of study co-authors Scott Loarie from the Carnegie Institution.
In their calculations, environmentalists used data from hundreds of satellite images covering 733,000 square miles of the cerrado, a vast savanna in Brazil. They measured the temperature, the degree of reflection and the intensity of moisture evaporation, as well as the amount of water lost by the soil.
For example, they found that when an area is converted from desert to cultivated or pasture, the cerrado heats by an average of 2.79 degrees Fahrenheit (1.55 degrees Celsius), and then in If it is sown with sugar cane, it cools by an average of 1.67 degrees Fahrenheit (0.93 degrees Celsius).
The authors noted that a positive effect is achieved only if reeds are grown where fields and pastures used to be. This ability is lost when sugarcane is planted on previously untouched land.
Ecologist and co-author of the study Greg Asner stressed that land use methods have an obvious impact on the local climate, which indicates the human factor in climate change.