This Is Why Planting 1 Trillion Trees Might Be A Bad Idea
Planting a lot of trees might be your first thought in mind when it comes to combating the climate change crisis. But unfortunately, things are really not that simple as you’ve thought but instead much more complicated and difficult to carry out. We had about 6 trillion trees before humans started cutting them down to the current time when we have only half of them left. Earth is experiencing Climate change on a scale it has never seen before and we are causing it by pumping more heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere than Earth’s natural carbon sucking systems can take out. As currently, forests remove a quarter of carbon dioxide humans emit into the atmosphere each year and store it.
For the past, 370 million years trees have been one of the major sources Earth sucks excess carbon from the atmosphere. Currently, trees absorb a quarter of all the carbon released by humans into the atmosphere each year. They consume energy from sunlight and convert atmospheric carbon and water into energy-storing carbohydrates. This chemical reaction is also popularly known as Photosynthesis. The excess carbon left in this process is stored as newly formed wood tissues. For hundreds of years, trees store this carbon-containing wood and they continue to draw down carbon for as long as they grow in their lifetime.
Cutting down trees, burning or using wood as fuel basically puts that carbon back into the atmosphere. However, when a tree dies and starts to decay some of its carbon is released back into the atmosphere. But a significant amount of carbon dioxide is stored in the soil, where it remains for thousands of years which too eventually sweeps back into the atmosphere. As a matter of fact, there is more carbon locked up in all the world’s trees combined than in all the fossil fuels which are still remaining in the Earth’s ground.
Planting 1 Trillion trees is much more than just planting 1 Trillion trees. The large swath of land required for 1 trillion trees would equal that of the size of the United States and would be capable of storing around 200 billion tons of carbon, accounting for over 1/6 of human carbon emissions. Forests are complex networks of living organisms or ecosystems wherein, fellow plants, animals, insects and micro-organism communities are all almost dependent on each other for their survival. Planting such a humongous number of trees artificially might not give abundance time for these ecosystems to grow and thrive. This means we can’t just plant trees to draw down carbon; we need to restore depleted ecosystems.
There are no one particular species of tree that can survive in every ecosystem. The most sustainable species to plant are always the native ones, which already plays a particular role in their environment. According to researches ecosystems with a naturally occurring diversity of trees have less competition for resources and they better resists climate change. Some researchers also worry that restoring forests on this scale may have unintended consequences like producing natural bio-chemicals at a pace that can actually accelerate climate change.
Protecting trees we already have is cheaper and easier than planting new ones and even if we succeed in restoring these areas the present and future generations need to protect them from the economic and natural forces like the 2019 Amazon wildfire that burnt at least a billion trees and the 2020 Australian bushfires which may have burnt over 10 billion trees. Thus, the complexity of rebuilding new ecosystems tells us how important it is to protect our existing forests.
