How to plant a forest: Context is key
news.mongabay.com
news.mongabay.com
Indeed. I've heard on the news that one of the reasons for the current drought here in Brazil is the loss of the forests which carried humidity from the Amazon towards the south, where many important basins are located. Since most of the electric power here in Brazil comes from hydroelectric dams, and most of them are in rivers coming from these basins, this drought leads to an increase in the use of thermal generation, which means an increase on the CO2 output.
This way we could have both forests and urban areas acting as carbon sinks. Somebody should tell Americans and EU leaders that wooden buildings do indeed exist already.
Concrete without rebar can be used for construction of small buildings and those would last a long, long time. Much longer than anything made of timber. A 20-generation home of sorts. Remember that once the timber rots away or is burnt, the trapped carbon gets released again.
Some Roman concrete piers have actually hardened further through the constant action of the waves, so they are now harder than they were in antiquity.
Let's grow more trees and go back to buildings made of wood isn't commonly suggested though.
In the UK wood is historically used for floors, doors and windows. The rest was stone until canals and trains enabled brick to be used. With roads came concrete.
It goes beyond that. A forest is not only a collection of trees. To have a forest you also need an undergrowth (I think it's called that way). That's why we have less forest but more trees in some places in Europe.
We need urgently to stop cutting virgin forests. There are not many left and it'll take centuries, maybes millennia to have them back.
This process can be sped up via intelligent afforestation (Miyawaki, permaculture etc).
Heavy mulching combined with densely planted native plants of different heights (everything from understory to canopy layer) effectively traps enough moisture and introduces a wide enough variety of microbes to sufficiently kick start a positive spiral mimicking virgin forests.
This requires manual input of water and mulching for the first two years or so. After that point you have a self sufficient, dense forest that rivals natural ones.
Combined with water harvesting (swales, check dams, man made ponds) this has been proven very effective in dry parts India, China, Northern Africa and Australia.
Now I wonder. With an efficient water desalinization how long would it take us to turn arid zones into complete oasis?
That would be massively helpful against global warming.
If planting x trees is an incentivized metric you can end up with most of the trees dieing or with a monoculture forest that degrades the land.
DO you really think that it's the growing forest that's the cause and not the symptom?
If you plant a new forest it would take some carbon out of the atmosphere because old dying trees would be replaced by new tree. Sure eventually the carbon inputs and outputs would be equal, but the built up forest would hold some carbon.
Sure, if you bury wood in deep mines and seal them, you are removing carbon from the biosphere. But for that, it doesn't really matter if it was wood that you grew or an already existing forest. The mere act of planting is neutral, it's the burying that is important.
By that, you notice that it would be fairly idiotic to keep unearthing old carbon and burying new carbon at the same time. Thus, it is absolutely essential to stop unearthing million-year-old carbon and putting it in circulation.
For this reason, living in the heavily forested countries on the equator is much more tolerable than living in the interior of the Arabian peninsula.
I'm very skeptical that as we keep mining new carbon from the deeps every year, we con manage to put all this carbon into the biosphere, and none into the atmosphere.
But a new forest will be a large carbon sink if allowed to remain.
Individual trees are also great carbon sinks, as long as the resulting wood is not consumed.
I wonder about just growing trees/bamboo and storing the logs on big piles as a carbon sink.
Or what if we GMO some algae that grabs carbon through photosynthesis, and then sinks to the ocean floor?
Now the question is how to utilise used wood without releasing carbon. May be just drown it to deep water?
So it seems you could weigh wood with some rocks and sink it there as a permanent enough solution.
Biochar is pretty similar to what you're describing.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/amazo....
We would have to essentially recreate the Azolla event (a geological process that took place for 800,000 years) to undo the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
The only way to stop climate change is to stop digging coal and oil out of the ground and burning it.
Log houses have been a thing for a LONG time in many parts of the world, and other types of wooden building exists as well. It seems like environmentalists have totally forgotten this obvious and superior form of carbon sink.
Here in Finland we're building even large blocks of flats from wooden materials these days. Yet the EU keeps telling us not to utilize our forests as much as we do now...
Not that I've done any math, so I could be wildly wrong.
If this were to become a global trend, I think it could really absorb a lot of carbon while also reducing concrete emissions. Admittedly logistics could increase the costs for many parts of the world that lack forests with suitable wood.
This can be managed as long as the demand curve moves in predictable ways.
Run it through a translator if you don't read Swedish.
Harvesting, milling, kiln drying, and transport all seem to me like quite energy intensive operations.
Of course, reforesting Sahara is a tall order. Even Israelis, who are arguably very good in reforesting semiarid regions, only have limited experience in this regard.