UK company develops drone that plants 60 trees a minute
UK start-up BioCarbon Engineering has built a drone that can fire pods of biodegradable plastic containing seeds into the ground from a height of 10 feet at a rate of up to 60 seeds a minute. The film's founder, Lauren Fletcher, claims that a swarm of six to 10 of the drones could plant 100,000 trees a day and help local communities nurture the resulting saplings by doing weeding and delivering nutrients and pesticides. The company hopes that its technology will support the UN sustainable development goal of halting deforestation and is conducting trials in the Amazon region.

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The world’s forests lose an area equivalent to 48 football fields every minute, according to the World Wildlife Fund. And in the last two years, the rate of deforestation in the Amazon has increased by more than 20 percent—the highest rate in a decade. That means our planet’s ability to sequester carbon and mitigate climate change is constantly decreasing, and so are resources for people and animals who live in or near forests. Meanwhile, reforestation has lagged, partly because it is…

Read more stories by Kristine Wong.