Today, more people are demanding action to tackle the global climate crisis than ever before. This is a find across borders across continents and sometimes bewildering. Array of critiques and responses are hitting the public consciousness.
We wanted to take a closer look at one of the most familiar. Trees could remove nearly 25 % of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere we’re gonna have to pick trees everywhere. The target is to plug to thousands of trees, trees, suck up and store carbon.
So why not learn more of them? It seems like a compellingly, simple answer to the question of how humanity can begin to repair the planet. But what do the experts think? I’m a filmmaker here at the Economist, and I want to find out the real story behind trees and climate change.
The world ambition for reforestation for planting trees has never been great. Private companies have schemes like even for house, for example, they had a scheme where for every hundred years they would plant the tree Wow really yeah, because it’s, just an easy win for companies to say plant a tree.
If you do, this will penetrate, but it’s, not as simple as that, and it’s, not necessarily having the benefit good thing. This represents how much carbon can be stored. If all reforestation projects are plantations – and this is if you let all forests regenerate – naturally natural slow growth forests – you can see it’s drastically higher.
So one of the pertinent kind of questions for you, this big study a few weeks ago that said that tree planting has mind-blowing potential to tackle climate crisis. So I think that’s, the kind of key starting point for our research.
Looking at to what extent that’s, true to what extent, trees and planting the trees can tackle climate change, when this study from the Crowder lab was published in July, these were the headlines. Janu study is suggesting that the best way to fight climate change is through trees.
It says this could reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Quite I mean nature sometimes has the best remedies right. So we’re about to call professor Tom Crowder, who said the tree. Planting has mind-blowing potential to tackle climate crisis, so I want to speak to him, find out how and see whether it doesn’t sound too good to be true.
Yeah time Tom Crowther, I’m, a system professor of ecosystem ecology at ETH Zurich, and we about a year ago he has started the Crowther lab, where we sort of bring together a lot of perspectives to have a holistic understanding of where all the Carbon on earth is and how we could manage ecosystems to store more or less carbon in those areas.
Why it’s new and important. So simply put we just made a very high-resolution model of where trees could exist on the planet and by quantifying how much carbon is in that land. We can actually show that restoring forests can capture far more more carbon than we ever previously thought.
What we found is actually forests have the potential to capture 200 Giga tons of carbon since the start of the Industrial Revolution. We’ve got about 300 Giga tons in the atmosphere, so it would be very slow and we have a very it would be over 200 years, but still we’re talking about a really really powerful carbon drawdown solution.
These numbers, you know sound great, but how does that translate to I’m so glad you asked these questions because the big media explosion was pretty devastating wasn’t really. I mean it was great, got loads of people interested, but it also made led to loads of confusion, and we would never ever propose that tree planting works everywhere.
We’re just showing the full potential it’s, not like 200 Giga tons are really going to come out the atmosphere immediately. It would be amazing if we even reach 10 % of that full potential, and so we need all of the possible climate change solutions in in concert.
But I do believe trees are more powerful than any of anything else that I know of because there’s, such a low-tech, easy access solution. Anyone can get involved in it. You feel good about yourself when you give a dollar to a tree to plant a tree.
It’s more important than the simple carbon sequestered by trees. It’s, the advocacy that it promotes. I don & # 39. T really will address climate change until we all feel positive and engaged in there in the challenge, and I think it’s, a beautiful way to open the door to get us engaged.
The message that Tom was keen to communicate from his study was clearly both broader and more nuanced than some of the headlines suggested, but is he right to argue that trees are more powerful than anything else in engaging people in the climate crisis we’Ve written on the merits of different approaches to this challenge across the globe, so Asher and I sat down with one of our senior editors, Oliver Morton, who specializes in climate science and policy yeah.
Well, I mean the world some had other plans are the single most important thing people can do about. Climate change is to plant trees. That’s, not really the single most important people think thing people can do about.
Climate change is to find ways to move humanity, humankind of the use of fossil fuels, which is like planting trees, isn’t good, but you know by and large getting off. Fossil fuels is very important, but I think that’s.
True, almost anything anyone says about any single action. It’s, a good thing, but there’s, no magic bullet. If int keepings, to take into consideration when people talk about planting trees is what else is going on off the land where they want to plant the trees? And the other thing is that sometimes planting trees, you plant the wrong sorts of trees in some parts of the world.
Planting trees makes the world warmer. Simon knows that she pointed us to some studies which it took into Simon Lewis. I have no idea why you’re talking to me anyway. Simon has forgotten more about trees than I will ever know.
[ Music, ] say some. Unless is an expert in global change. Science and you’ve been took used to you, along with the detail. In fact, we playing up on the website some articles and other research, material and fuel to take a look at that.
Then click on the info card in the top right hand of this screen up now we’re on the way to come. An interview with Simon increasing the forest area on earth is really important, but we should remember that tree planting is not always good.
It’s all about the how the trees fit with the local environment. That often means balancing competing interests for the land. Where those trees might be planted and considering the needs of local communities, but it also matters where, in the world those forests might grow, there are three main types of forests on the planet encircling the North.
The vast boreal forest is disproportionately rich in carbon and covers large swathes of Russia, Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia. Diverse temperate forests grow sporadically throughout the parts of the earth, with more moderate climate and tropical forests grow along and close to the equator in the tropics.
The trees grow very fast because they’re growing fast, because there’s. Lots of resources, lots of sunlight water and also evapotranspiration water, to the atmosphere, which is helping cool. That cooling occurs in part, because the clouds formed by this water in the atmosphere reflect the sunlight in the colder north.
It’s snow rather than clouds that offer the most reflection. Growing. The boreal forest means less snow and more dark. Absorbent tree cover, which means there is less of a cooling effect, is more of a warming effect which partly offset the carbon storage in the forest and, according to one study in tropical forests that grew more than 40 %.
The temperature decreased by just over 1 degree Celsius in temperate forests. It decreased by around half a degree, but in boreal forests the temperature actually increased. One example of restoration project that going quite well is in Uganda on the edge of Kigali National Park just 20 years.
After the initial planting and it’s, moving back towards a mature forest and a very high carbon storage forest, so it’s really possible to go from almost nothing to really impressive forest in in just a matter of decades.
In the tropics, it’s great, that everyone loves trees and loves tree planting. What people forget the emissions are going straight out in the here-and-now those trees might absorb those emissions. Eventually, it may be 20 or 30, maybe 50 years, but there’s.
A big time mismatch. We need to reduce fossil fuel emissions dramatically and fast, and then some of those residual emissions that we can’t mop up and can’t reduce. Then we could use some tree planting to do that.
So there can be a more limited world for trees in helping to reduce carbon emissions, but even that’s, dependent on the type of trees in forests that are grown. Which is why Simon has sent us to check out an interesting and very English project.
I’m here in Sussex south of England at the net castle estate. There’s. The castle. This estate is a former farm. It was a standard farm about 30, 30 or 40 years ago, and the owners in the fields and naturally occurring flora and fauna to flourish here by leaving them alone.
We’re here to talk about taking carbon out of the atmosphere and how much success it can have not just here but on a global scale. Wilding is a pans off approach. It’s, become a sort of environment that is a nursery for open, grown freely, regenerating trees.
Within 20 years we have doubled our carbon sequestered in the soil. We & # 39, ve got the scrub. We & # 39, ve got the grasses. We’ve got the trees, all that will be contributing to this carbon sink. That’s.
Actually the start of another film which you can watch by clicking the link opposite in it. We look at why this hands-off approach is effective and some of the big challenges in terms of forestation. At the other link, you can see the economists latest writing on climate change.
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Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WRgv4V1ZxN4