Japan wants to plant no-pollen trees to solve its hay fever crisis

Filed 1h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

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Waltz of the Carnies

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: European Parliament · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Japan is grappling with a hay fever epidemic affecting more than 40% of its population, driven largely by sugi and hinoki trees planted en masse after World War II to rebuild bombed-out housing stock. Those same fast-growing conifers now blanket roughly 70% of the country's forests, and climate change has stretched the pollen season longer and made it worse.

The government's 2023 fix is to fell 20% of the sugi trees across 4.3 million hectares by 2033, replacing some with local species and others with newly bred low-pollen strains. Researchers have developed more than 30 such strains, and Toyama prefecture has already planted about 100,000 saplings.

The plan runs into two mundane obstacles: a forestry industry short on workers to do the cutting and planting, and a shrinking domestic homebuilding market that leaves officials hunting for somewhere to sell all that timber.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Planting a single tree species across most of a country's forests and being surprised when it causes trouble is the kind of mistake a person only makes once, and Japan is now paying for it twice, first with decades of itchy eyes and now with a decade-long cleanup plan. Ten years to cut down 20% of the trees is a patient timeline for a problem this miserable. Here's hoping the low-pollen saplings grow faster than the labor shortage does.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Waltz of the Carnies · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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