Global forest restoration is the most effective carbon capture opportunity
terraformation.com
terraformation.com
Tackling man-made climate change requires many solutions working in tandem, forest restoration is just one of them.
trees were not optimized for clearing human blunders?
trees and vegetation have been capturing carbon and providing a critical service for most ecosystems on earth since... forever (well not forever but for a damn long period of time). to believe that we can come up with something better is a short time span is naive at best.
even if we do nothing, i believe that mother nature will adapt to the mess we have created and in the grand scheme of things we are just a blip.
Humans have substantial differences from the rest of the nature. Recent example with COVID-19 vaccine, developed within months, shows speed of progress which focused approach can reach.
Forests are pretty good, and better than many naive options; just not guaranteed to be best available, if humanity would try harder to solve this crisis.
It's a NON-Problem earth-wise, and a pretty simple thing anyway. Humans never made a real great thing...well one exception...change the climate with burning lots of dead dinosaurs, the next one would be stop and maybe reverse that, and maybe in the future revive mars with terraforming.
Trees and Bushes and grass do not just consume CO2 but also moisturize the air, prevent the ground to dry out, prevent erosion of the soil, give mushrooms insects bacteria a place to life and so on, the CO2 thing is just a really small part in a functional system called nature.
We will not be able probably for the next 500 years, to fully understand and create a harmonic system, let alone find better solutions as the living earth already did.
>>Humans have substantial differences from the rest of the nature
That assumption is substantial incorrect. We are a normal part of nature not more not less, we cant survive at least ATM without a functional system.
i’m not trying to diminish the vaccine or anything that humans have achieved. it’s that we’re really really small and insignificant when it comes to the universe in general and earth in particular.
Forests are currently a carbon sink primarily because of centuries of harvesting, and because of increases in atmospheric CO2 improving autotrophic efficiency. As they grow back and grow faster they're absorbing more carbon than they release, but this is temporary. Eventually there won't be more space to grow, and metabolic efficiencies will diminish and possibly even flip--e.g. higher temperatures can increase decomposition rates. Reforestation can't fix the problem, only buy us a little time.
But don't take my word for it:
> Although land practices have the potential to offset a small but significant portion of anthropogenic emissions, they should ultimately be seen (with the exception of geological sequestration through BECCS) as a short-term stopgap measure.
Source: The Terrestrial Carbon Sink, Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 2018. 43:219–43, https://harvardforest1.fas.harvard.edu/sites/harvardforest.f...
That said, preventing further deforestation is a no-brainer. The annual net carbon flux of a forest is nothing compared to the carbon stored in the tree stands and the soil, much of which is quickly released when the land is cleared.
[1] Heterotrophs are far more efficient today than they were hundreds of millions of years ago.
We do already have carbon capture systems that are more effective per unit area than plants at capturing carbon.
I say this as someone biased in the opposite direction, forest ecology is my career!
I wonder what education or lack of someone must have to think that re-forestation is not the right thing to do right now. Planting trees is not rocket science and could for example be done with planes (like China does). Even when forests aren't enough to reverse climate change we can use wood instead of concrete as our building materials or use wood to make bio-fuel or bio gas all of which will reduce our CO2 footprint.