Forests only sequester carbon as they grow. After that they are carbon neutral. You end up with land that cannot be used for any economic purpose. (The creatures and plants that live in it have a value too, but that is not part of this argument).
After that, at some point, in a year, ten years, a hundred years, the forest burns. And all the carbon is released.
A pointless waste of time. We do it because we are obsessed with things we can count (one tree, two trees....) and fixated on the short term.
There is a better way: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00167...
Increase depth of top soil all over our agricultural land. It increases productivity and sequesters carbon. But it has no profit centre and is hard to measure, and given our "big man" capitalist culture that is the problem.
We really must stop producing CO2. That is the only answer that does not steal the future from our children
I will be paraphrasing the science articles I have read lately...
Planting new trees on bare land does not work to capture CO2. So if you deforest an area and then re-plant, you put a lot of extra CO2 into the atmosphere. Like 30% of the trees you harvest go into durable things (like houses) and the rest will decompose and release its carbon. After you leave the ground bare, it starts spewing CO2 from the soil. This is a major carbon source. New trees you plant will EVENTUALLY soak up more CO2, but canopy closure needs to happen before that can happen. Since the young trees are planted with considerable spacing, the soil CO2 source outpaces the tree CO2 sink for many years before the balance shifts.
Mature forests throughout history probably did tend to be carbon neutral on average, yes. This is ignoring ecological changes... like... maybe forest conversion to other landscapes and fires were balanced by healthy forest uptake. I digress.
These are not normal times, and CO2 concentration is very high. Because of that, old-growth or mature forests may be significant sinks of CO2. The best strategy for us to draw down more with forests is to leave as much mature forest untouched as we can.