Two hours’ drive out of Tel Aviv, on the southern slopes of Mount Hebron, the Yatir Forest is the country’s largest planted woodland, with 4 million trees spread across 7,400 acres. Dense stands of Aleppo pine gird the hillsides, in vivid contrast to the dun-colored Negev desert.
Two hours’ drive out of Tel Aviv, on the southern slopes of Mount Hebron, the Yatir Forest is the country’s largest planted woodland, with 4 million trees spread across 7,400 acres. Dense stands of Aleppo pine gird the hillsides, in vivid contrast to the dun-colored Negev desert. The forest’s high points have views east toward the Dead Sea and south across the Negev, toward the town of Be’er Sheva and a solar power plant that glints through the haze.
Yatir was planted in the 1960s by the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF), a private, non-profit group that was created in 1901 to buy and develop land for the Zionist movement and now owns around 13 percent of Israeli territory. KKL-JNF is currently extending the Yatir Forest along narrow embankments designed to hold water on the land and help the trees grow.
KKL-JNF has made wide-ranging claims for the environmental benefits of the Yatir Forest, saying it is holding back the desert, recharging soils with moisture, preventing floods in Be’er Sheva, and fighting climate change by capturing carbon dioxide from the air. But this showcase forestation project also has its share of critics, with some Israeli ecologists saying that, whatever the benefits, the collateral damage has been too great. The trees, the ecologists say, are obliterating grasslands that contain rare endemic species. There is also evidence that the new Israeli desert forests have so far caused more warming than cooling, as the dark mass of the Yatir Forest’s trees is absorbing solar radiation, while the lighter colors of the desert once reflected the sun’s heat back into space. The Yatir, some experts say, is an example of the ecological damage that can occur when large-scale forestation projects are undertaken in places that have not had forests in recent times.
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
An area in the northern Negev Desert that has been cleared for tree planting. (Photo Credit: YOSEF SEGAL)
