Misguided projects to plant trillions of trees distract from the real work of controlling carbon emissions and reining in climate change. (via openmind_mag)
. And many planting campaigns are used to justify clearing climate-critical forests elsewhere, she adds.
In 2011, following Maathai’s death, UNEP found a new face for its cause: a charismatic 13-year-old Bavarian boy named Felix Finkbeiner, who had already adopted UNEP’s catchphrase “Plant-for-the-Planet” as the name of a tree-planting nonprofit he had founded at age nine.Despite the high-profile nature of these efforts, scientific justification for mass tree planting remained sparse until 2015, when more rigorous defense began appearing in the peer-reviewed literature.
They concluded that planting more than a half trillion trees could sequester “a considerable proportion of the global anthropogenic carbon burden,” some 205 gigatonnes, over several decades. According to NASA, that would be a reduction of approximately 25 percent of current atmospheric carbon levels, “enough to negate about 20 years of human-produced carbon emissions at the current rate, or about half of all carbon emitted by humans since 1960.
Overstating the climate benefits of planting trees can hamper real solutions to climate change. Trees alone can’t actually cancel out the effects of burning fossil fuels, but claiming they can helps corporations skirt actual climate action while pouring money into tree-planting projects that may do more harm than good.
“Campaigns would do better if they planned for trees’ permanence and scaled up their quality rather than focus on the quantity of trees put in the ground,” says Karen Holl. And yet, equating trees planted to carbon sequestered has become a staple of many tree-planting campaigns and seems to be a big business. The world’stoday include the cloud-computing company Salesforce, which has bankrolled the planting of nearly 44 million trees, as well as German retail chains REWE and dm-drogerie markt and Staples Europe, each with over one million trees purchased as part of the Plant-for-the-Planet campaign.
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