The greening of Earth's vegetated areas “is due to carbon dioxide fertilization, climate change and land use changes”. [emphasis, links added]
New remote sensing research (Gutiérrez-Hernández and García, 2025) uses powerful statistical methods to eliminate false positives and spurious correlations in establishing vegetation trends in the satellite era.
Scientists found that over the past 42 years (1982 to 2023), 38% of the Earth's land surface has experienced a statistically significant greening or browning trend.
Traditional method (i.e. Mann-Kendall test) Previously found that 51% of the Earth's surface experienced statistically significant vegetation trends in the satellite era Key factors that produce less accurate, exaggerated results may be overlooked.
Through this new analysis method, the truly significant trend (TCT) test, The authors firmly establish that there is a “remarkable global greening trend” due to carbon dioxide fertilization and climate change.
“Applying a newly proposed workflow method (True Significant Trends, TST), we reveal a striking global greening trend, with a large portion of the Earth's land surface showing an increase in vegetation cover over the past four decades, in particular It's in Eurasia.
Specifically, 76.1% to 85.4% of statistically significant vegetation trends represented greening, while 14.7% to 23.9% were browning trends.
“Of these significant trends identified using the TST workflow, 76.07% represented greening, while 23.93% represented browning. It is noteworthy that considering areas (pixels) with NDVI values above 0.15, greening accounted for 85.43% of the significant trends , browning accounts for the remaining 14.57%. These findings strongly confirm the continued greening of global vegetation.
in other words, The greening trend dominates the browning trend with a ratio of about 4:1, that is, 80% to 20%.
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