Tree planting is not a viable strategy for decarbonizing the atmosphere on human time scales.
“Planting a billion hectares of trees won’t be easy,” he said. “It would require a massive undertaking. If we follow the paper’s recommendations, reforesting an area the size of the United States and Canada combined (1 to 2 billion hectares) could take between one and two thousand years, assuming we plant a million hectares a year and that each hectare contains at least 50 to 100 trees to create an appropriate treetop canopy cover.”
(NASA)
This is not to say that we shouldn’t plant trees. We should, but the idea that tree planting will result in reductions of greenhouse gases over the course of a single human life time on the order of the ~teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ is fantasy. If we want to re-establish a stable climate sooner than 1,000 years, we will have to pump the carbon back to the place where it came from: underground. Thus, CCS.
As someone who plants a lot of trees, the main benefit in my view is the huge protective effect they’ll have on extreme heat in urban areas. They’re an essential climate adaptation strategy but not a very good preventative one.
Tree planting is not a viable strategy for decarbonizing the atmosphere on human time scales.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t plant trees. We should, but the idea that tree planting will result in reductions of greenhouse gases over the course of a single human life time on the order of the ~teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ is fantasy. If we want to re-establish a stable climate sooner than 1,000 years, we will have to pump the carbon back to the place where it came from: underground. Thus, CCS.
As someone who plants a lot of trees, the main benefit in my view is the huge protective effect they’ll have on extreme heat in urban areas. They’re an essential climate adaptation strategy but not a very good preventative one.