Adding 1B hectares of forest could help check global warming

forests are known to support huge fungal networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network

That makes me think prairie may compete well with forests in effectiveness. Many prairie plants have 10' roots or more, and the root systems are dense. Over time they do quite a bit for the soil and sequester a lot of biomass.

Interesting! What's interesting to me as well, is that despite their criticism, both scientists do seem to support the opinion that it is an extremely important measure to add to our portfolio of climate measures.

That's an important point - where those trees go when they die is part of the puzzle. Systems thinking is important. When a tree decays, I wonder how much carbon goes into the soil vs. into the air. What about when a forest fire goes through? More frequent controlled burns help prevent catastrophic forest fires, but do they cause a smaller or larger overall co2 release? On the one hand, a firestorm causes entire trees to explode that would otherwise survive with little damage. On the other hand, frequent burns might burn material that would otherwise decay into soil...

Any paper in a landfill is going to decompose back into CO2. You'd be better off recycling it and reducing demand for lumber.

would be possible with a global cap/trade system with real enforcement mechanisms

Ziplines? Tree houses? Truffles? Exotic Mushrooms? Hunting? Exotic woods? Food Forests?

Sustainable forestry practices (selective thinning and cutting)?

Apparently you can get "Gold Standard Land Use and Forests" certification for your forest and sell carbon credits for $18 USD/tonne or so to polluters.

https://www.goldstandard.org/luf

Here they calculate carbon benefit for 7500 hectares in Cameroon, which appears to be ~3 million tonnes annually:

https://www.cifor.org/fctoolbox/download/Topic-4-Section-D.p...

($7200/hectare annually seems like a lot of money to me...)

Sustainable forestry is not a particularly complicated business, and if you are selling the wood for buildings etc. the carbon is not released back into the atmosphere for quite some time.

A lot of jurisdictions are looking at updating building codes so you can use treated wood for larger construction projects. If this was done in a number of large markets, it could reduce demand for concrete, which is the number two contributor to GHG emissions.

UBC completed a wooden 18 story apartment building a couple years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G22kYhaT-h4

Forest bathing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_bathing?oldid=487393303

This may be one component, but certainly not sufficient

1B hectares od trees is much different than 1B trees

1B hectares of trees supports approx. 1T trees. As with everything, it will not be the solution to climate change and has to live alongside other measures. But it is one of the cheapest (in terms of money) and least radical (in terms of lifestyle adaption) measures we can take for the effect it will have. This study shows that the earth has enough space. It will require a shift in priority for many governments (e.g. Brasil) though.