Downsides to planting trillions of trees | Hacker News Reader

Downsides to planting trillions of trees

vox.com

127 pointsmrpopo130 comments

I keep hearing about farmers in poorer countries cutting down mature forest in order to profit by planting more saplings. That completely defeats the purpose, you think people would have caught on by now and put in checks against that.

Planting trees at the wrong time of year also seems to be a constant issue. It’s not just an issue of sticking something into the ground. Timing and location matters. A single tree might make hundreds or thousands of seeds each year but the number that sprout and survive to adulthood is a very small fraction, there is a lot that needs to go right.

Once all that happens it often takes several years before you start to realize the carbon benefits. So really things like “carbon credits” really need to be based on trees surviving to adulthood, not just sticking a sapling in the ground someplace. But once you get to that point there is ongoing benefit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

> The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdote of a (possibly ahistorical) occurrence in India during British rule.[2][3][4] The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.[5]

I first heard of this idea from Terry Pratchett, who as well as explaining the problem gave a possible solution:

> Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats – and then people were suddenly queuing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: ‘Tax the rat farms.’

—Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

This has an historical precedent:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...

posted multiple times on HN, last time 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27264816

All metrics of scientific evaluation are bound to be abused. Goodhart's law [...] states that when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Programs to reduce exploding wild boar populations in the US had the same problem.

I recall most trees are actually counted by the number and not necessarily volume or any other more reasonable metric. For example here in the Netherlands you can easily cut down vast amount of trees as long as you simply replant the same amount of trees. Diversity doesn't matter and it results in images of seeing incredibly dense populated pine trees, that are so close they're even choking each other and just the tips survive. Suffice to day these "forests" don't really live long.

Sometimes I think some of the most valuable assets will be century old trees.

A mature forest doesn't remove much CO2 from the atmosphere. A growing one does. Depending on what you do with the felled lumber, it could be much better for the environment to chop down a forest and plant a new one.

A mature forest not only hosts diverse ecosystems, it also produces a beneficial local climate.

It's also a gross oversimplification to look at CO² balance by absorption by trees only. Floodplain forests, forested swampland and broad-leafed trees also store massive amounts of CO² even when the forest is mature.

But more importantly, mature and healthy forests offer a broad range of benefits beyond binding CO². Reducing the value of forests and the associated ecosystems to CO² is a flawed approach. There's many more factors involved, including preservation of fresh water.

>CO²

Nitpick here: I see you've gone into the effort of stylizing the 2, but chemical formulas are supposed to be numbered using subscripts, not superscripts.

CO₂

This is a non intuitive result, and people is confused often by that, but adult mature [1] trees grow much faster than young trees. Faster here does not mean taller, means bigger.

[1] I'm not talking about dying trees, mature does not mean dying necessarily.

A mature forest isn’t just filled with mature trees you get the full lifecycle and close to zero net carbon capture.

It’s not obvious when walking around because adult trees significantly outnumber dead ones, but trees decay in a tiny fraction of their total lifespan.

Decay can sequester carbon in the right ecosystem and physical geography. Western Europe has its topsoils thanks to centuries of wild mature forest.

Do you have a source, both ways seem to have some logic to them (a larger growth is a smaller percentage growth for a large tree, for example - adding 1% to a massive tree is better than 10% to a tiny tree), but also we're used to new life increasing size far faster ...

Actually, I might tree rings not getting smaller as a tree grows taller is probably enough evidence to see that the carbon added increases over time? Would be nice to have a rigorous source to review too?

do you have some science to back up this claim? i’ve read a bit about this as an layperson and the mature vs young forest debate seems kinda inconclusive. but it also seems like keeping a mature forest’s ecosystem in tact is better than clearcutting and planting new trees that supposedly grow faster and capture more carbon. by clearcutting, you’re removing and releasing a lot of the ecosystem (mushrooms and such) that also play a part in carbon capture and storage. capturing carbon is only one part, from what i understand, a mature forest’s ecosystem does a lot to retain it, too.

'grow faster' is a bit of a vague statement. What we should be talking about is biomass added, which is what sequesters carbon. Older trees unequivocally add mass at a faster rate, which is geometrically obvious when you consider that old growth tree rings add about the same radius each yeah that young growth trees do, and then consider that area of a circle grows with the square of radius.

see:

https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/study-finds-lar....

Maybe the middle way should be not clear cutting but punctual culling so you'd try to get best of both worlds... and getting closer to regenerative agriculture as well.

That's such an incredibly short-sighted and single-tracked view on what is "the environment". Planting trees will not magically fix the climate, and carbon sequestration is not the solution to all our problems. Destroying ecosystems for the sake of capturing more carbon makes no sense, if for no other reason that it reduces the chance of survival of the new trees. You also can't lose focus from the end goal of why we're trying to capture CO2. The goal is to save the environment.

> A single tree might make hundreds or thousands of seeds each year but the number that sprout and survive to adulthood is a very small fraction, there is a lot that needs to go right.

While this is true, I think you are stretching this to fit your particular narrative. Seedlings that sprout from a nut that "didn't fall far from the tree" have a lot of things going against it. The shade of the mature trees around it prevent it from getting enough sunlight. There are other factors that contribute as well.

Consider the cottonwood tree. Its seeds drift in the wind (definitely out of the range of the tree's roots/shade), and there's lots of seeds.

And yet the GP's point stands; the vast vast majority of them do not sprout, or, if they do, do not make it to maturity.

It makes sense that planted trees are not thriving in ecosystems where there wasn't already trees naturally. If the conditions were so good for tree growth, you would have a lot of trees there already.

But, this brings to mind that there are places where there once were forests that humans destroyed. Why don't those locations quickly re-forest themselves?

Because, in the process of deforestation, humans destroyed the entire ecosystem that made said forests possible. Nature can't repay that ecosystem debt all that quickly and it's not sped up much by way primates plopping saplings into the soil for money and calling it a day.

Climate change is the mother of all collective action problems and one of our great filters. I dream that one of the descendants of my nieces and nephews will pass through the ensuing population bottleneck.

[Edit, removed speculation on tree growth rates and repercussions.]

It must be a massive temptation for the poor living near massive, high-value, tropical hardwoods to just go and fell them.

Yes, carbon credits should be based directly on mass of carbon taken from the air, we can measure forests, seems like it could be? Saplings need caring for too, there is ongoing benefit and ongoing cost.

Former forester here. Some trees support more biodiversity than others. An oak tree forest is a lively place, full of insects and fungi, plants etc. A commercially planted pine tree forest is pretty much a dead zone: completely quiet, like a graveyard.

For anyone in the south east of England, I'd recommend a visit to the Knepp rewilding project if you want to experience this effect for yourself (for everyone else there are some interesting YouTube videos). It's an old farm which has mostly been left to fend for itself, except for some carefully managed animal activity.

The minute you walk into the site it's apparent from the dragon flies and insect noises that there is something different about the place. It just feels alive in a way I've rarely come across.

My house is like that. I say "mine" - I'm just the temporary steward.

I have seen insects that I've never seen before.

The tree diversity is not that great - we have stands of plantation Douglas Fir, and "wilder" stands of birch/beech/oak/chestnut. I fully appreciate the diversity that oak supports, though.

My suspicion is that the untamed meadow is a major factor in supporting the diversity. I have more tiny wildflower species than I can keep count of. I mowed a lot of it in this, my first, summer, but I will not be mowing as much of it going forward. I want a little lawn and some walkable paths - the rest I will refrain from taking from nature.

Unfortunately I need to manage the land very intensively or it'll be all bracken in three years. My view on wilderness, in this place, is that it takes a lot of work to make something look like no work has been done.

> My view on wilderness, in this place, is that it takes a lot of work to make something look like no work has been done.

Nicely put.

Great tip, I am only 1 hours drive away. Look great - I fancy the walks. Have you done a stay over or a walk or something else (treehouse) ?

We only managed the short walk, with a 2 year old that's about all we can manage. There are some longer walks which I'd like to go back and do. The overnight stays would be amazing, though they were reassuringly expensive when we had a look.

This is the sort of tip I've been looking for!

We (NZ) got a gift from the UK of gorse bush which now runs pretty rampant, but interestingly it's now being used as a tool for repopulating native plants, as it's hardy nature means it can work as a shield for vulnerable young native plants (https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/the-press/20210605/2... is the best source I could find for this, but I walked through that area about 10 years ago which is how I came to learn about it)

This is a great short film that goes into detail about the project and the challenges faced in getting it off the ground: https://youtu.be/3VZSJKbzyMc

There is also the accompanying book called Wilding, by Isabella Tree. Rewilding is the technique that Knepp promotes, and arguably got into popular culture.

Thank you for giving me a plan on where to visit for the upcoming weekends, it looks like a brilliant way of restoring nature.

This is really interesting to hear because it correlates with what I’ve learnt about the mountain area I’ve grew up in, south of Poland. The end of 1800s came with sawmills and extensive deforestation by the then governing Austrian Habsburg dynasty. At the time completely cut down forests were seeded with pines. Fast forward ~150 years, there’s now continuos effort to recreate a former deciduous canopy, due to the pines beeing more susceptible to disease and weak. And its really marvelous to compare old photos of dark green swaths of land during autumn to the yellow gold brown palette of nowadays.

Same thing in Germany, after WW2 and the boom and rebuilding thereafter, a lot of forests are pure pine forests since they grow very quickly and provided the wood for the country.

Sadly, that lead to a lot of forests all over the country losing their beautiful biodiversity that you can e.g. find in the black forest.

Nowadays they're also often diseased, as you said, and you can see whole blocks of forest being torn down to contain the spread.

In some regions - like Saxony - mono-culture reforesting to spruce forests had already started in the 18th century (after the Ore Mountains had been pretty much deforested by centuries of mining operations). Thankfully the forests are now slowly transitioned away from the mono-cultures. But I guess spruce forests are overall better than no forests at all.

The western US and particularly the Pacific NW has the same issue. Widespread clearcutting of mixed forests followed by planting a monoculture of quick-growing conifers. Fast forward 100 to 150 years and some of those conifer crops were cut down for cheap lumber and replanted, again with the same conifers. And then the Dendroctonus spp. showed up.

I visited the center of France recently, and there are a mix of natural and commercial forests. Commercial forests don't look like forests, they look like monocrop fields, that happen to have trees instead of corn or wheat.

I am glad someone raised this issue. I see this problem serious in Malaysia and Indonesia due to palm oil trees. People have cleared pristine forest and replaced it with pine trees.

And now palm is ubiquitous (You generally can't avoid it tbh like sugar) this problem is becoming more and more serious. These pine trees don't support convivial environment. And it impacts many ecosystem mostly orangutans.

What is it about pines that cause that?

It is their acid nature combined with there very high consumption of water, which is a consequence of their very rapid rate of growth. Modern pine trees grow like inflating ballon toys. You can almost watch them grow overnight.

Old-school pine, like scots pine, are not so bad. But these are not grown commercially as much. Pity, it is a nice timber… more red than modern pine.

They needle down and kill the surrounding weeds with those needles. The shadow of the canopy is much more interlocked and closed. Its dark, dry and dead down there.

If trees are planted commercially, they’re often planted «too close» since not all of them survive to «old age». This makes them much more dense than what you’ll find in untouched nature. (That’s just one aspect, see other comments etc)

Pines shade the ground throughout the whole year, densely planted ones especially. Leave trees, like beeches and oaks, loose their foliage in autumn, thus in early spring other plants get enough light on the ground to flourish, before the trees produce their leaves again.

It's not the pines themself. It's when its only pines i.e. lack of diversity.

This is not why pines cause less biodiversity, but there is another reason why you tend to see less biodiversity with pines.

They are more prevalent in colder climates.

That's surprising. I thought stone or white pines were some of the most symbiotic species in old growth forests, what with their nutritious seeds and fungal relationships. Is it specifically the 'commercially planted' aspect that causes that or do I have a misapprehension about pine as a species?

Not an expert, but I would guess the issue is, pines make the most of tough conditions & usually live where other things can’t; however, planting a pine farm in a location that could support oaks is a loss.

Summary: planting trees != growing trees, and it is often used as a token to gain political support while the ultimate outcome is dead trees.

Akira Miyawaki has developed a method of (re-)creating healthy forests:

> The Miyawaki method of reconstitution of "indigenous forests by indigenous trees" produces a rich, dense and efficient protective pioneer forest in 20 to 30 years, where natural succession would need 200 years in temperate Japan and 300 to 500 years in the tropics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Miyawaki#Method_and_cond...

A take on SV planting projects by one of the authors of the cited study :

In the last week I've started to receive inquiries from people running tree planting programs wanting my help. I am suggesting that they shut down their programs. Here I will explain why:

https://twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/14440088233506037...

That isn't a very good take. Global emissions are never going to zero. In fact, they've never even trended downward. Dissing initiatives with positive effects in favor of the dream that global emissions may just stop someday does not seem responsible.

It's putting all of one's eggs in one basket, and the basket can't even hold eggs.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

I don't think you read until the end. Dr Fleischman isn't advocating against planting trees to store carbon. He is against planting trees as a metric, without proper follow up, without consulting local experts, without concerns for local communities, etc.

As such, a business focused on the number of trees planted will have the wrong incentives and the results will be counter productive.

No twitter for me - what did you say?

https://nitter.nixnet.services/ForrestFleisch1/status/144400...

"Tweet not found"

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h In the last week I've started to receive inquiries from people running tree planting programs wanting my help. I am suggesting that they shut down their programs. Here I will explain why: 6:38 PM · Oct 1, 2021

130 2,550 751 7,090

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h Some context: A couple weeks ago a team I am a part of published a paper demonstrating the failure of long-term planting programs in India nature.com/articles/s41893-0… or ungated: conservancy.umn.edu/bitstrea…

Limited effects of tree planting on forest... Nature Sustainability - Large-scale tree planting programmes have been implemented or planned for areas around the world suffering from deforestation, but this study presents evidence that such...

nature.com 12 75 7 583

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h This follows an earlier paper that discussed some of the common failings of tree planting programs more broadly: cedarhimalaya.org/images/Fle… 3 19 2 319

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h This work has received some attention in the press, and it seems like the folks who've been contacting me all read the same excellent story by @BenjiSJones vox.com/down-to-earth/226793…

The surprising downsides to planting trillions of trees "We’re not going to plant our way out of climate change."

vox.com 4 106 4 616

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h The people who contacted me are in California and appear to be Silicon Valley businesspeople who are entranced with the idea of tree planting as a climate solution. I have no reason to doubt they are genuine & mean well. 3 21 5 480

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h Both have created web-based businesses where you can pay them to plant trees. The websites share a few characteristics. First, both clearly and directly reference the work of @CrowtherLab about a trillion trees as being their inspiration. 3 17 0 316

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h This is in spite of the serious doubts about the scientific validity of the trillion trees idea science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… and also goes against Bastin & Crowther's subsequent public statements.

Comment on “The global tree restoration potential” Bastin et al.’s estimate (Reports, 5 July 2019, p. 76) that tree planting for climate change mitigation could sequester 205 gigatonnes of carbon is approximately five times too large. Their analysis...

science.org 4 33 0 398

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h But its actually quite consistent with their initial press interviews. Bastin, Crowther, and their coauthors still have alot of work to undo the repercussions of their exaggerated initial claims (which they have since disavowed, including in the Vox piece linked above) 2 18 0 320

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h Second, both websites make other dubious claims about tree planting. For example, one argues that planting more trees will increase the oxygen in the atmosphere. 1 14 0 282

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h This isn't really true - while oxygen cycles through trees on balance trees and forests are not really a net source of oxygen (because their decomposition uses up about the same amount of oxygen they create) and anyway, the planet is at no risk of running out of oxygen... 4 34 3 514

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h Third, both sites sell tree planting as a way to offset personal carbon emissions. There is alot of debate in my field about the validity of this kind of offsets, too much for twitter, but a few key problems are: 1 27 4 514

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h 1. Land use change is already a major source of carbon emissions. The best way to think about forests absorbing new carbon is to think about this as offsetting carbon emissions lost from past forest destruction. 2 75 12 718

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h 2. Relatedly, there isn't enough space on the planet for natural ecosystems to absorb more than a small share of fossil fuel emissions. 6 99 11 723

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h 3. Trees planted today will absorb carbon in the future. Your emissions today start heating the planet today. 4 210 17 1,155

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h 4. Tree planting projects often fail, so if you plant trees rather than reduce your emissions, you might actually be doing nothing. 3 154 7 986

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h A project whose goal is to plant a certain number of trees is particularly vulnerable to failure because its counting the wrong thing. 2 46 3 557

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h If the goal is to absorb emissions, we should count the carbon, not the trees. A few small large absorb more carbon than a bunch of little trees. 9 69 5 754

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h When we plant trees with carbon uptake or forest restoration as a goal, we don't try to maximize the number of trees. We try to maximize long-term carbon uptake, and this might actually mean planting fewer trees up front besjournals.onlinelibrary.wi…

Guidance for successful tree planting initiatives Tree planting, along with other strategies to increase tree cover in appropriate locations and contexts, can make a valuable contribution to ensuring the ecological and social well-being of our...

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com 4 143 9 874

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h In addition, if we focus on the number of trees, we lose sight of the relationships that support long-term forest sustainability. Do the people who live near the trees benefit from them? Do they get to make decisions about them? Will the site support trees in a warming climate? 7 83 7 845

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h If the company's goal is to plant a number of trees, they are less likely to pay attention to the broader context that supports long-term tree growth. 2 30 2 517

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h To me a focus on the number of trees, as opposed to, say, the well-being of the people growing the trees, the carbon stored in them, or the biodiversity they support, is a signal that the tree growing project is not well thought through. I can't support or advise such projects. 3 158 12 1,165

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h What to do instead? There are lots of organizations in the world working to improve land management in local contexts in ways that lead to win-win outcomes. More carbon, more biodiversity, and more human well-being. Oftentimes the key interventions aren't even biophysical 10 86 4 734

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h For example, sometimes better restoration outcomes might be the result of land reform, not distributing seedlings. 6 54 6 615

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h Maybe this doesn't lend itself to a nice marketing slogan, but I hope these efforts shift in this direction. What they are doing now appears to be at best a waste of time & money, and at worst a dangerous greenwash. 5 30 2 620

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h I'll just add that lots of these good programs DO plant trees. Planting trees is wonderful. The right tree in the right place brings many benefits. But the wrong tree in the wrong place is harmful. We should focus on our overall goals, not on the number of trees we plant. 9 123 6 1,253

Forrest Fleischman @ForrestFleisch1 20h And planting trees does not give you an indulgence to burn fossil fuels the rest of the day.

Trees if left alone will plant more trees in most places.

Humans really make a mess when they interfere with nature (i.e. humans caused the very climate emergency) and tree planting is often a kind of intervention for other people first; for carbon offset, charity, startup investment or to make people feel better, for example.

The huge tree planting campaigns are not really about ecosystem improvement and biodiversity. Just ask any ecologist.

They do raise consciousness in young people however, and in some places we do need to tend and water seedlings but...

We just need to let the land do its thing and literally do nothing to much of the world. However that to many people is more shocking.

"Humans really make a mess when they interfere with nature"

Nature is red tooth and claw, it has zero concern for our survival. If we wait around for Nature to fix things, we will join the dodo and Wolly Mamoth.

Nature has been through glaciation, heavy bombardment, supervolcanoes, Sahara was a lush forest 'revently'. There were 6 mass extinction events. Climate change is not a threat to Nature, it's a threat to us.

Even if we start global nuclear war tomorrow, poison and pollute all rivers and oceans, in a couple million years Nature' will be back you wouldn't know humans ever existed.

> We just need to let the land do its thing and literally do nothing to much of the world.

We need to do a very simple thing to most of the world: leave.

Regions that supported <10k people in the past are now populated by millions. Next thing they wonder why their agricultural practices and water use has become unsustainable and the land becomes unfit for human habitation...

A massive reduction in population growth helps more than doing nothing. That, however, to many people is unacceptable for religious and ideological reasons.

> A massive reduction in population growth helps more than doing nothing. That, however, to many people is unacceptable for religious and ideological reasons.

The entire concept of “need” and what is “helpful” is ideological, so you are simply stating your anti-human ideology and shock that other humans have a pro-human ideology. And if you continue inflicting yourself on the world, it's a hypocritical anti-human stance, as well.

> The entire concept of “need” and what is “helpful” is ideological

How so? Is it objectively good to have a dozen children in an economical, political and ecological environment that would lead to most of them starving, getting ill, becoming child soldiers, and staying poor and uneducated with no prospects for a bright future?

> so you are simply stating your anti-human ideology and shock that other humans have a pro-human ideology

No, I'm just exposing the anti-human nature of "be fruitful and multiply" at the behest of religious doctrine that doesn't care about the consequences.

Whenever "reducing population growth" is equated with destruction of human life, the person associating the two exposes themselves as an actual monster.

How on earth is "not having 10 starving, uneducated, sick children with a future of continued existence in poverty" anti-human? Can you explain that to me?

I'm advocating for people in the Sahel to have only one or two children that they can actually feed and send to school and who may eventually find a job and make a decent living as opposed to ending up in the same miserable conditions they parents find themselves in.

Unsustainable population growth is a major problem [0] [1] [2] and if your little world reduces the planet to your local neighbourhood and "pro-life" activism at your local church, then we might just have different perspectives on life.

Why it is so hard for some actual ideologists to just look at facts and simply accept the economical, ecological and political effects that uncontrolled population growth can have; it's truly beyond me.

What really grinds my gears, however, is how some folks can sincerely equate suggesting solutions for improving the live of billions of people with being "anti-human", while it's their religious doctrine that's causes the continued suffering of generations to come.

I'd rather see a Bangladeshi family of three with a child that has access to healthcare, education, healthy environment and a stable economic future than parents who struggle to even feed and clothe their 5 children in their 25 m² makeshift hut without sanitation in the slums of Dhaka...

But sure, it's ME who's the anti-human hypocrite.

[0] https://ideas4development.org/en/population-growth-sahel-cha...

[1] https://www.britannica.com/place/South-America/Effects-of-ra...

[2] https://bankofinfo.com/population-growth-in-bangladesh/

> > The entire concept of “need” and what is “helpful” is ideological

> How so?

Because both are meaningful only in the context of a particular value system.

> Is it objectively good

No, “good” is inherently relative to a value system; “objectively good” is an oxymoron. That's the point.

Actually, leaving cities would make a bigger difference. All the little towns of a few thousand people arent causing problems. It's the centralized , systematic destruction causing issues.

That sounds backwards? A million people in a city have much lower environmental impacts than spread widely across otherwise wild land?

>A massive reduction in population growth helps more than doing nothing.

I always suggest an author of such proposals to start by reducing themselves from the population.

Next best measure and much more easily advocated for: not have kids.

Why? The person did not propose culling or anything. What they said is true: human population is the main problem.

No, the Earth could easily sustain billions more if they had the same carbon footprint as Africans or Vietnamese (or many dozens other countries).

Not all human beings have an unsustainable way of life so maybe we should stop considering population as being the problem but which part of the population is responsible for the problem. Just like we don't accuse "human population" for murder but those who are actually murdering.

I bet all those who blame the population are among the few with the worst environmental footprint...

You're right in the sense that a modern chicken farm supports untold amount of chickens without collapsing. Yes, it's possible, and quite doable, but the chickens have absolutely horrible lives, taste bad, and their eggs are disgusting.

Is that what we want as a species? An overpopulated planet? It can always support a bit more if just try harder, right? I sure don't want that for myself.

I am unable to honestly judge my own environmental footprint because I lack a ton of information. That said, I don't even have a car and have been living well below my means for quite a while. Don't even consume meat.

Do I win anything, since it is a competition?

UK has one of the highest population destities in the world:

"all the buildings in the UK - houses, shops, offices, factories, greenhouses - cover 1.4% of the total land surface."

This is not a chicken farm untill we have 100 billion people, which we never will.

We are like illiterate medieval peasants who trow shit on the street and in the river and they wonder why they get the plague. Must be overpopulation.

Nice try. UK is 52.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

You're right about people being inconsiderate fucks but somehow forget that having a lot of human monkeys in one place sucks ass. Civilized or not, everyone has to eat, drink and shit. Oh, yes

Well, they did write:

> We need to do a very simple thing to most of the world: leave.

Does having "we" in there mean anything to you?

That by using first-person-plural that they’re volunteering to be part of the solution?

Don't over-interpret.

By "leave" I mean the literal "leaving", e.g. not staying in places that are unfit for human habitation.

Why do we need to have unsustainable permanent settlements in the Arctic? Why are there multi-million cities in the middle of the desert?

Interpreting the term "leaving" as anything else than "moving away from a place" say more about the thought process of the person interpreting it that way than about the one making the suggestion ;)

> I always suggest an author of such proposals to start by reducing themselves from the population.

I always suggest to people who associate a "reduction in population growth" with genocide to check their own attitude towards the value of human life.

If you are unable to see the difference between having 10 starving children and having one well-fed child that can go to school and thrive in a liveable environment, I would have trouble respecting you as a person.

Alternatively, we could get the rich people poor again, since it's a small part of the giant population that's causing all the problems.

What makes you think that? The population growth in Sahel area ranges from 130% to 230% in the next two decades [0].

This is an area that historically only supported a fraction of its current inhabitants. Continued exponential growth will bring the already overstressed ecological and economical environment to its total collapse. These are not rich people. These are the poorest of the poor and they will destroy the last bits of forest, arable land and ground water reserves in the region just to survive.

Ecological collapse doesn't start and end with CO2 emissions and taking joy rides into space after all.

Continued uncontrolled exponential population growth in regions that simply don't support that many people is a problem.

[0] https://ideas4development.org/en/population-growth-sahel-cha...

A forest's advance across denuded ground can be quite slow in some conditions. Hypothetically humans really could lend a significant helping hand to accelerate recovery in those cases.

For example if seed dispersal is low, or if the absence of shade kills the saplings (through exposure or lack of moisture retention)

I'm not a climate expert but it seems to me that planting trees is a great solution to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which we should concentrate vast amounts of effort on right after we figure out how to stop releasing decades worth of fossilised carbon every year. Until that point it's just pissing into the wind.

Trees are part of the solution. If we were to reforest the world you begin to encounter other issues like land for farming(although agroforestry helps with this), land for solar farms/nuclear, etc. It is annoyingly complex. I would argue rewilding the land is more important for restoring biodiversity and reconnecting humans with nature. The carbon sequestration it provides is just an added touch.

This short little web game: https://www.roadto10gigatons.com/ illustrates the benefits and tradeoffs of carbon removal solutions (from trees to direct air capture tech).

I think we need to try everything to see what’s most cost-effective: every possible solution has to deal with the enormous scale of the problem — ~36 gigatons of CO2 emitted each year, and we need an effective 99.9% reduction in CO2 emissions sustained for the next millennium.

That last 9.9%[0] is going to be incredibly hard if it was an actual reduction rather than some other solution, so carbon capture is probably important.

But that means that even if planting trees is only 360 megatons/year — 1% of the ultimate problem — it can still be a big part of the solution.

Might get replaced (economically speaking) with something more direct, like Sabatier-process fuels, but for now it’s worth trying. (But all that said, trying must always have the possibility of the answer being “no”).

[0] Guestimate on the basis that last-percent is generally more difficult than first-percent, and how much comes from each sector.

I think it's more millions of years than decades.

And tree is a very short term solution, because they die and release all the carbon they absorbed as they rot.

This is true, but you can do it as a long term solution.

Just change a non-forest area into a forest area and keep it this way long term. Trees will die in this area but will be replaced by new trees automatically. So you have an amount of CO² bound to this forest long term.

Actually, rotting vegetation does not release all of its carbon. Soil mass actually increases, and soil carbon percentage goes up.

Plus, that carbon-rich soil can support much more biodiversity than a soil with low carbon.

Goodhart's law applies here.

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

> pays farmers to plant trees on their land, but in some cases, they would clear a chunk of forest before putting seedlings in the ground.

Depending on the age of those trees and what they do with them (hopefully homes) that's good

Clear cutting is rarely a good forest management practice.

Does this count for global warming temps and everything else around it?

Obviously, if we decided to limit warming to 1.5C at all costs, an extremely effective solution would be detonating nuclear weapons or triggering volcanic eruptions to block sunlight, but it's also obvious that would have far-reaching consequences on the ecosystems, likely worse than global warming.

Generally, it applies when the stastic is used to judge many individuals, rather than a single entity.

Serious things need serious effort to spend money and allow resources. And the will to keep spending until you succeed.

Nobody would drive a car made by volunteers or go to a war without thinking into spending serious money so, why we still think that saving nature can be done cheaply?, why we think that can solve our biggest problem with just a beach shovel, a couple of donuts and praying for rain?

Hire a few people, by Picea's sake!

We need to put professionals that know what are doing here. They were replaced with free labor and let the saplings at the mercy of the weather and here are the poor results. School children doing unpaid job for a day is heartwarming, but bad management and mostly useless. Is just a publicity stunt.

Saving nature requires resources, not selfies.

True, and I think there is an appetite for that. Unfortunately that appetite naturally attracts opportunists that will do anything to game the metrics set by the people spending the resources. Not saying that's a reason not to try, but our willingness to spend must be tempered by a careful vetting of anyone willing to be paid.

In EU the farming subsidies pay most handsomely for trees, more than crops. Can't let them die, payout is dependent on yearly inspection. However, the soil needs to be in the bottom half of the quality scale, so most farmland out there does not qualify.

That is true in theory but in many places the trees are planted and let to fend for themselves in the hope that a nearby weather or man-made event (such as a flood or fire) can be blamed on their demise. I have seen this happen several times and more (such as outright fraud where the trees are not planted at all).

Planting trees is expensive, especially if you are registered as Organic farmer (which means more EU money too). You get more money by keeping them alive. Not planting doesnt work, you will get an inspection and no money. Maybe depends on where you live I guess.

Maybe it depends, my experience was in the South of Portugal where you get a subsidy to plant olive trees (as an example). They get the big terraforming machines out and basically destroy complete hillsides and then plant the trees protected by 30cm high plastic tubes.

The only care I saw was done by a few farmers that would replant and generally remove the vegetation around them which is hard and noisy work with petrol bushcutters.

I also know someone whose plantation was burned down and he got a fine and had to replant because he forgot to notify the authorities.

These were the exceptions that stood out. There are thousands of hectares of destroyed and abandoned by the fraudulent ones. You can even see it from Google Earth.

Are forestry subsidies better than CAP? Another problem is that it's one way, I've look at afforesting grazing land but since you can't clear the forest to revert to grazing it loses resale value.

What Im talking about is part of CAP if I understand correctly. My soil is too good for trees so I cant grow them anyway.

Does anybody know if/how Ecosia tackles long-term viability of their trees?

Edit: From their site: "Of course, not all trees survive; that never happens. Ecosia therefore only counts trees that will survive for more than three years – a time when they’re robust enough to face most natural threats.

For instance, if we plant 1000 trees and know from experience that the mortality rate in this area is 25%, we’ll only add 750 trees to our tree counter. We continually measure the survival rate of the trees we plant, through inventories and satellite technology, and adjust our tree counter accordingly."

(https://blog.ecosia.org/how-do-ecosia-trees-survive-cut-down...)

Wouldn't it make sense to build a lot more things out of wood? Like, paper and wood are pretty decent long term carbon stores, nah?

At least here in Europe most wood that is being used is farmed.

Paper and wood are not good long term carbon stores. All paper and wood will release its carbon back at some point, so they are only temporary stores. Good long term store would be something that lets a large amount of carbon be buried deep and never reenter the cycle.

I'm hearing good things about "biochar":

> Biochar is charcoal that is produced by pyrolysis of biomass in the absence of oxygen; it is used as a soil amendment.

> Biochar is a stable solid that is rich in carbon and can endure in soil for thousands of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

Biochar is great - you can gassify biomass into a methane-rich energy source to generate electricity and then fertilise soil with the carbonaceous residue. It's the kind of technology that gives me hope for future generations.

Even better, combine it with that methane to carbon black process from the other day, and all of the carbon from the biomass is now solid form…

What's long term for you? Isn't 200 years pretty good?

I don't think the average lifecycle of a paper product is anything close to 200 years. Even for books that's pushing it, when you consider how much more toilet or printing paper we use and discard...

And bleached paper generally uses enough toxins in its supply chain that it can't be easily composted. Therefore when the fibres are too broken down to be recycled again, it generally has to be disposed of in an anaerobic environment, which produces methane as a byproduct.

Now of course, while methane is a powerful greenhouse gas it stays in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than CO2, and it can be captured for energy generation. Even so, while solid wood objects are probably quite good for carbon sequestration, I don't think paper will be unless a few key aspects of it change.

How much of the paper that is being produced today do you think will survive 200 years?

Let's be realistic about it. If paper/wood was meant to provide any dent in atmospheric CO2 we would have to be drowning in it. Remember, it is not enough to produce wood. You have to take care that it doesn't burn or rot.

It rots and some of it's carbon stays in the soil, increasing the mass of the soil.

Permaculture food forests are a very sustainable and productive way to create or restore a forest: https://youtu.be/6GJFL0MD9fc

That's an inspiring video!

The thing that strikes me about it is the cultural shift from seeing Nature as a resource to exploit to seeing Nature as a partner and guide.

While the article makes many valid points about how tree-planting projects can be mis-designed, ignorant of surroundings and context, chosen as a corporate gimmick etc. - the rhetoric is problematic. It insinuates that forestation/tree-planting projects are irrelevant or undesirable generally; and the title specifically has this insinuation. But that's not the case - and even the article concedes that such projects can and do succeed often and when done right.

Grasslands are a more reliable carbon sink than trees: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-grasslands-reliable-carbon-tre...

Quasi-religious fixation on CO² is unhelpful.

What about biodiversity? What about fresh water preservation, preserving topsoil and preventing mudslides, regional climate, local and global precipitation patterns, etc.?

Forests aren't just about CO² and looking only at this one aspect is detrimental to the cause.

Some people consume too much media, they literally miss the forest for the trees

Seagrass and mangrove is even better: https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/09/29/seagrass-the-plant...

https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1123

Was it just me or was this article a bit pedantic? Of course just playing trees alone isn’t going to solve climate change—but is anyone saying that?

It was less pedantic than I expected.

Re-wilding land will be a big part of fixing climate change, but I think anything that focuses heavily on the planting of trees, rather than a holistic approach (e.g. stopping things getting cut down, asking why things are being cut down and fixing that cause) is probably a pointless stunt. I thought they covered that fairly evenly.

"to the erosion of culture and livelihoods of a nomadic group called the Gujjars"

Ok, I object to the use of an environmental term here ... a lot. It's a false metaphor, used for charlatan effect by the writer trying to be "creative".

Global warming will likely displace, at a minimum, 2 billion people in the coming decades. Want to know what erodes culture? Displacement of entire societies and civilizations.

I count myself a liberal, but this kind of liberal hand-wringing is very counterproductive. Eggshells will be broken in attempting to avert climate change., and handwringing over animal grazing over land that very likely was deforested for that purpose (and for subsistence agriculture)...

This isn't about "culture", that usual NIMBY roadblocks, of the liberal version this time, to block necessary economic and political change.

While the article highlights obvious management problems (wrong species, wrong timing and tree management to ensure it takes root, perverse economic incentives), reforestation has enormous potential as one of a hundred necessary simultaneous fronts of the climate effort/war.

We need reforestation. Carbon capture. EV transition. Energy efficiency. Strong carbon taxes on fuel. Olivine. Reduced meat/artificial meat/fake meat. Better agricultural technologies and techniques. New cement manufacturing processes. Nuclear. Solar. Wind. Energy Storage. Geothermal. Telecommuting. Tax changes to incent urban concentration rather than suburbs. Biofuels/algal fuels/synthetic fuel from carbon.

But above everything will be change, experimentation, adaptation. Which everyone hates, produces winners and losers, and will exact a human cost, even though that real cost will be far less than the potential cost, something humans are absolutely awful at understanding.

I guess what is most concerning is that global warming requires global coordination and cooperation, but the future will be one of climate wars and resource wars. I wonder if we have but a couple decades of a window for policy cooperation before things fall apart because of stresses from global warming and things descend into madness.

So what's need is humanism, but not some junk like "we need to preserve this small tribe's outmoded economic basis!!!" for, what, anthropological purposes?

Happy Saturday!

The Great Green Wall is arguably a very successful forest program. The program started back in 1978 and estimated to finish in 2050: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China)

Seconded. Throwing money at the problem will only make it sub par to what nature has to offer as solution. We need to reduce and let go the flawed ideas of controlling and clearly see that the unlimited growth and money creation accelerates the problems we gave mother Earth. Enjoy nature while you can.

What’s the Least Bad Way to Cool the Planet?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/climate-change-ge...

I wonder if they're missing a trick here. In poor soil conditions it might be beneficial to have a fast turnover of trees to start off with; you could bootstrap the soil by burying baby trees to improve the conditions for the next batch.

One similar method I've heard of is aggressively trimming fast-growing varieties and burying the trimmed limbs to build soil. Medium-size trees grow faster than small ones, and many respond to pruning by growing even more quickly.

This is the same story as every other large government initiative. Wasteful and often counterproductive to the stated goal. Trees plant themselves, ya'll! If we stop cutting them down they'll do fine.

How to build a healthy forest:

Step1: Fence off 100000 acres in a proper climate zone.

Step2: Wait 1000 years.

Trees are like solar-powered carbon capture machines.

Yup, they're great! Provided you have a lot of unused water and land, of course.

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