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Deforestation is a one of the key causes of global warming. Trees absorb CO2 known as the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and then keep it inside which takes the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. However, tropical rainforests and other forests have been disappearing rapidly, impairing their ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
At present, Sumitomo Forestry Co., Ltd. owns a total of about 40,500 ha of forest in Japan alone, a surface area that accounts for 1/1000th of the entire country. This much forest absorbs some 250,000 tons of CO2 annually, or about three times that emitted by the entire Sumitomo Forestry Group (90,000 tons). In other words, Sumitomo Forestry’s efforts to maintain healthy forests makes up for the Sumitomo Forestry Group’s emissions and more.
Shinichi Miyake, an executive officer and manager of Forest Management Division at Sumitomo Forestry, states that “plants photosynthesize water, CO2, and solar energy according to a fixed formula 6CO2+6H2O+686Kcal = C6H12O6+6O2. Plants use this process to grow, transforming inorganic substances into organic ones. We do our business transforming the raw wood our forests yield into the economic asset, so without taking good care of the environment, we will go out of business.
Maintaining the forests and the resources they represent is a long process consisting of seedling production, planting, weeding, thinning, and pruning. Once trees are harvested, the entire process starts again in a cycle that lasts 50 to 100 years. |
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“There are only 20-some people actually managing Sumitomo Forestry’s forests, including those from affiliates. We instituted an electronic mapping system using GIS early on to allow relatively few people to manage huge tracts of land efficiently. Thus, we know in detail just what kinds of trees are present, and at what stage of growth they are, in our forests all over the country,” says Miyake.
One of the company’s prime goals is to maintain the health of the forests. By performing thinning and other kinds of maintenance on the forest, Sumitomo Forestry also helps to increase the quantity of CO2 its trees can absorb.
Wood harvested from the forest, both at thinning and final-cutting stages, keeps the CO2 “sequestered” within it indefinitely. When this wood is used for construction, it effectively creates an another forest of trapped CO2. Since Sumitomo Forestry engages in wooden house construction business as well as forest management, it helps prevent global warming this way as well.
The contributions of each of these four companies to the problem of global warming might be small, but this is the way the issue must be approached, for there is no single quick solution. Instead, corporations and individuals must each make a commitment themselves and do what they can. It is the accumulation of such small steps that will have a decisive effect in the end.
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The century-long process of forest creation
1) Biotechnology helps develop seedlings that can withstand wind, snow, and competition from grasses.
2) Seedlings are planted in the spring. They are planted with care to maximize root development.
3) Limbs are pruned from the bottom up to produce high-quality, knotless trees.
4) Trees are not cut indiscriminately; instead, only fully grown trees are cut. The machine makes light work for the cutting crew. |
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