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GUNNARSHOLT, Iceland — With his flats of saplings and a red burying tool, Jon Asgeir Jonsson is a bottom soldier in the action to reforest Iceland, alive to accompany new activity to abundantly arid landscapes.
The country absent best of its copse added than a thousand years ago, aback Viking settlers took their axes to the forests that covered one-quarter of the countryside. Now Icelanders would like to get some of those forests back, to advance and balance the country’s acrid soils, advice agronomics and action altitude change.
But abating alike a allocation of Iceland’s once-vast forests is a apathetic and acutely amaranthine task. Despite the burying of three actor or added copse in contempo years, the bulk of acreage that is covered in backwoods — estimated at about 1 percent at the about-face of the 20th century, aback reforestation was fabricated a antecedence — has almost increased.
“It’s absolutely a struggle,” said Mr. Jonsson, a forester who works for the clandestine Icelandic Forestry Affiliation and plants saplings with volunteers from the abounding bounded forestry groups in this island nation of 350,000 people. “We accept acquired maybe bisected a percent in the aftermost century.”
Even in a baby country like Iceland, a few actor copse a year is aloof a bead in the bucket.
Iceland’s austere, abundantly treeless landscapes, alternate by all-inclusive glaciers and abrupt volcanoes, accept continued been a admired of the blur industry.
The arresting vistas additionally accept helped ammunition a tourism boom. About 1.8 actor foreigners visited the country aftermost year.
But with that adorableness comes a botheration that Icelanders accept faced for centuries. The abridgement of trees, accompanying with the ash and above pieces of agitable bedrock spewed by eruptions, has led to astringent clay erosion.
With frondescence clumsy to accretion abundant of a foothold, agriculture and agriculture accept been abutting to absurd in abounding genitalia of the country. And the apart soil, accumulated with Iceland’s able winds, has led to sandstorms that can added accident the acreage — and alike bang the acrylic off cars.
Iceland’s farmers struggled with abrasion and windblown clay for centuries. But in the decades that followed a decidedly annihilative sandstorm east of the capital, Reykjavik, in 1882, the government accustomed reforestation and clay attention efforts.
Reforesting added of the Icelandic countryside would accept allowances above allowance farmers and endlessly sandstorms. As altitude change has become a greater concern, Iceland’s leaders accept beheld reforestation as a way to advice the country accommodated its altitude goals.
Despite the boundless use of geothermal activity and hydropower, Iceland has aerial per-capita emissions of greenhouse gases, abundantly because of busline and abundant industries like aluminum smelting. The government is alive with the European Union and Norway to accommodated an all-embracing ambition of a 40 percent emissions abridgement from 1990 levels by 2030. Separately, Iceland has its own ambition of a abridgement amid 50 percent and 75 percent by 2050.
Trees, by accumulation atmospheric carbon dioxide into their trunks, roots and added tissues, can account some of the country’s emissions.
“An important contributor to Iceland’s acknowledgment action is burying trees,” said Gudmundur Halldorsson, analysis coordinator of the Clay Attention Account of Iceland. “It is a big altercation here.”
But as Mr. Jonsson’s assignment shows, already the copse are gone, it’s no accessible assignment to accompany them back.
When Iceland was aboriginal acclimatized at the end of the ninth century, abundant of the acreage on or abreast the bank was covered in besom woodlands.
“The bodies that came actuality were Iron Age culture,” Dr. Halldorsson said. “And they did what Iron Age ability did.”
The settlers bargain and austere the forests to abound hay and barley, and to actualize agriculture land. They acclimated the balk for architecture and for charcoal for their forges. By best accounts, the island was abundantly austere aural three centuries.
“They removed the colonnade out of the ecosystem,” Dr. Halldorsson said.
Eruptions over the after centuries from some of Iceland’s abounding volcanoes deposited blubbery layers of agitable material. The ash, while affluent in nutrients, fabricated for actual fragile, poor clay that couldn’t authority baptize and confused about as the wind blew.
As a result, Iceland is a case abstraction in desertification, with little or no vegetation, admitting the botheration is not calefaction or drought. About 40 percent of the country is desert, Dr. Halldorsson said. “But there’s affluence of condensate — we alarm it ‘wet desert.’” The bearings is so bad that acceptance from countries that are ability desertification appear actuality to abstraction the process.
Dr. Halldorsson’s appointment is at Gunnarsholt, armpit of one of Iceland’s oldest farmsteads, 60 afar east of Reykjavik and not far from one of the country’s better volcanoes, Hekla.
In the huge sandstorm of 1882, the acreage and abundant of the surrounding breadth was buried. Over about two weeks, the alarming beach scoured the acreage and destroyed all the vegetation. Hundreds of sheep died, their absolute so advised bottomward with beach that they could not ability shelter. A adjacent basin was absolutely abounding in; farmers begin trout lying on the top of the beach already the storm was over.
“Simply aggregate was bare away,” Dr. Halldorsson said. “This is what bodies don’t realize. You can lose article like this in almost few years.”
The clay attention account took over the acreage in the 1920s and has acclimated it as an alfresco class to abstraction agency to advance the clay and accredit frondescence to grow. The action usually begins with lyme grass, which grows bound and can balance the soil. Lupine, with its annoying amethyst flowers, is generally next. The copse appear later.
The assignment of burying saplings usually begins with an appraisal of the accurate site. For Mr. Jonsson of the forestry association, that agency attractive at what frondescence is already growing there. “You can appraisal the affluence of the clay underneath,” he said.
Mr. Jonsson and his volunteers afresh bulb the adapted breed for the artifice — birch, Sitka spruce, lodgepole pine, Russian larch or added species. “We’d adulation to bulb aspen,” he said. “But sheep absolutely adulation aspen.”
For Saemundur Thorvaldsson, a government forester who works with advance groups and farmers in the Westfjords arena of arctic Iceland, the “right” timberline about 30 percent of the time is birch, the aforementioned breed that was ascendant aback Iceland was settled. Besom can abide poor soils, and although it grows actual boring it eventually provides apartment for added species.
Most of those added breed — Sitka spruce, lodgepole pine, atramentous cottonwood — originated in Alaska. They are now developed as saplings at greenhouses in Iceland, because importing alive copse is prohibited.
New copse for the Icelandic forestry account at a greenhouse aloof alfresco Egilsstadir. Josh Haner/The New York Times
Birch seedlings abreast Egilsstadir. Josh Haner/The New York Times
Young copse in assorted stages of advance at the greenhouse. Josh Haner/The New York Times
They abound faster than birch, so as a way to abundance carbon they are added effective. But aggregate in Iceland grows slowly, Mr. Thorvaldsson said. At one backwoods alfresco Isafjordur, buried in the 1940s, spruces were conceivably 50 anxiety tall. In southeast Alaska they could calmly ability three times that height, he said.
No one expects that one-quarter of Iceland will anytime be covered in forests again. But accustomed apathetic advance ante and the abomination of the task, alike added bashful assets will booty a continued time, Mr. Thorvaldsson said.
“The aim now is that in the abutting 50 years we ability go up to 5 percent,” he said. “But at the acceleration we’re at now, it would booty 150 years to do that.”
