We love planting trees

Everyone loves trees. Planting a tree is universally positive and wholesome. It invokes an image of care and nurture. Hands full of dirt, investing in the promise of a green, fruitful future.

Add to this picture, a 2019 study published in Nature claiming that planting a trillion trees could capture a third of the greenhouse gases humans have released since the industrial revolution. Voila, a perfectly packaged climate solution - easy to sell, relatively straightforward to implement, doesn’t ask too much of us and feels pretty good.

Later that year 46 scientists got together to respond to the study. Their main critiques were:
i. The study’s GHG capture estimates were way over inflated;
ii. planting trees where they don’t belong, i.e. in grasslands and snowy terrains would likely backfire by disturbing local ecosystems that play their own parts in keeping things cool;
iii. the idea that we could potentially solve the climate crisis by planting trees distracts from the very real need to ditch fossil fuels and deforestation.

The critics didn’t throw the baby out with the bath water though. The right trees in the right places can in fact go a long way in mitigating climate change. Tropical forests do for example have the ability to sequester lots of carbon. But sometimes we don’t even need to plant a tree for a forest to grow back - we just have to provide the right conditions.

Those conditions could be incentives to landowners with mangrove forests on their property to keep them from selling to a resort development. Or to work with farmers on agroforestry to help improve yield while growing native trees. Or it could be to invest lots of time, money and knowledge in collaboration with indigenous communities to restore degraded land to some of its former glory.