A trillion trees would sequester a large fraction of our excess CO2, cheap. A lot of organizations want to do their part. But the doubters and deniers have gathered. And we are losing 10 billion trees a year. There is no time to waste. You can help.
The Trillion Tree Solution
Why, how, and where, as in the map above.
Feb 20, 2019 - Planting 1.2 Trillion Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 ... that planting additional trees is one of the most effective ways to reduce ...
The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, we found that there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as one of the most effective carbon drawdown solutions to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.
Forestation and deforestation
3334634.2
Hectares of replanted forests
Globally, this year
About half of what is needed
Aug 23, 2019 - Earlier this month, the Ethiopian Government announced a new world record: thousands of volunteers planted 353 million trees in one single ...
Excellent. Now we need to do that 3,000 times over.
A Trillion Trees – How Hard Can It Be?
The idea of getting the job done by hand — it’s about 130 trees per living person — boggles the mind.
Jul 5, 2019 - That means we could restore 1 trillion trees for $300 billion, though obviously that means immense efficiency and ... Objections & Quibbles.
Global investment in wind and solar has been running about $300 billion annually. So nobody can claim that we can't do it once governments get sufficiently educated.
Could planting 1 trillion trees counteract climate change ...
Jul 23, 2019 - And how does one go about planting 1 trillion trees? And where should they be planted? Although tree-planting is a simple solution — effective ...
AP: Lots of trees to hug: Study counts 3 trillion trees on Earth
More than 3 trillion trees now grow on Earth, seven times more than scientists previously thought. But it’s also trillions fewer than there used to be, a new study concludes.
A United Nations-affiliated youth group had a goal of planting one billion trees and Yale forestry researcher Thomas Crowther was asked if planting that many trees would do anything to help combat human-made climate change. Trees capture and store heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
Crowther said first he had to figure out how many trees are on Earth and that number was far more than anyone expected: 3.04 trillion trees, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
But there used to be twice that many.
Crowther mostly blames people. His study found that 15 billion trees are cut down each year by people, with another 5 billion trees replanted. That’s a net loss of 10 billion trees a year. At that rate, all of Earth’s trees will be gone in about 300 years.
Opinion: So, about that “trillion trees” study… - EnergiMedia
It's a complicated study with important findings and caveats. This blog will dig into a few nuances that were buried under a trillion trees. As we'll see, forests are ...
The nuances don't change the main point.
Wired: Trying to Plant a Trillion Trees Won't Solve Anything
There’s room for 0.9 billion hectares of new trees, they said—2.2 billion acres of tree cover, which draws down 205 metric gigatons of carbon, or 225 billion tons in US non-metric. That’s in line with the goal of keeping warming at or below 1.5 degrees, per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. World: saved!
But there are claims of scientific error. Again, these don't challenge the main idea, just the numbers for the possible benefit.
The researchers calculated that under the current climate conditions, Earth’s land could support 4.4 billion hectares of continuous tree cover. That is 1.6 billion more than the currently existing 2.8 billion hectares. Of these 1.6 billion hectares, 0.9 billion hectares fulfill the criterion of not being used by hu-mans. This means that there is currently an area of the size of the US available for tree restoration. Once mature, these new forests could store 205 billion tonnes of carbon: about two thirds of the 300 billion tonnes of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution.
This is a Denialist Web site. Apparently, they love tree-planting as long as they can argue that it removes the need to stop burning carbon. But this article plays it straight. Stay away from the comments, though.
Pushback
- Your math is wrong. (It's always wrong on the first try. We'll learn better.)
- Trees change the flow of water. (We'll look into it.)
- Trees absorb sunlight, increasing warming. (Say what?)
- Forest fires would release the carbon again. (Some of it, decades from now.)
- Don't plant in savannahs, completely changing the ecology (OK)
- Drawing carbon from the air releases carbon from the oceans. (They say that like it's a bad thing.)
- We can't use this as an excuse not to cut emissions. (Well, duh!)
- We need other carbon sinks. (Ditto)
See Also
We plant trees for a better world. Help us children to save our future
Scalable, affordable & immediate
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen dramatically over the past century. Our goal is to remove 1 trillion tons of it and bring the concentration back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels. To accomplish that we have to both cut our emissions and draw down the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. While climate change can seem insurmountable, agriculture presents a scalable solution that we can act on right now, starting with the soil beneath our feet.
One of the suggestions is to turn some of those trillion trees into charcoal for amending soils, and planting more to replace them. Of course, there are other ways to get carbon into soils, instead of depleting it as we have done for ages.
High-biochar soil
Microscopic structure of biochar
