If we follow the paper’s recommendations, reforesting an area the size of the United States and Canada combined (1 to 2 billion hectares) could take between one and two thousand years, assuming we plant a million hectares a year and that each hectare contains at least 50 to 100 trees to create an appropriate treetop canopy cover.”Įven once the trees are planted, says Saatchi, it will take them about a century to reach maturity. “Planting a billion hectares of trees won’t be easy,” he said. In some parts of the Northern Hemisphere, countries have been able to save more forests, but other areas, such as the tropics, have seen massive deforestations because of the need to feed larger populations.”įire suppression tactics have allowed this forest at the edge of a savanna in Gabon, Central Africa, to regenerate naturally. Since then, Earth’s population and land use have increased drastically. “The science community has been looking at these questions to some extent for a long time, but there’s more urgency to address them now, since we no longer have the same climate conditions we had 50 or 100 years ago, when humans began massive deforestation for agriculture and human settlements. “The paper has sparked a healthy debate in the science community, which has now come forward to begin to address issues that the paper did not,” he said. “We need to understand not only whether it’s possible to do such a thing, but whether we should do it,” he says. However, he says, “the devil is in the details.” Many Unanswered Questionsīefore a global forest restoration effort is undertaken, Saatchi says, numerous questions must first be addressed to assess the concept’s feasibility, scientific soundness, cost-efficiency, risks and other considerations. He says their conclusions on tree restoration aren’t that different from the recommendations made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018, which suggested that 950 million hectares (2.3 billion acres) of new forests could help limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5-degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by 2050. The researchers used new satellite-based land cover and land use maps, along with other climate and soil data and advanced techniques to arrive at their results. Saatchi says the study establishes a reasonable estimate of global forest restoration potential and addresses the issue more directly than previous work. Credit: Andrea Borgarello for TerrAfrica/World Bank But it could still have some partial impact on our ability to reduce climate change.”Ī multi-country-led effort called the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) is working to reforest 100 million hectares of land in Africa by 2030. To do that, we need to reduce human emissions of greenhouse gases. “It’s definitely not a solution by itself to addressing current climate change. “I feel there’s a strong possibility a significant portion of these lands can be reforested to their original forest cover,” said Saatchi, an expert in global forest carbon stocks and dynamics. But while he says there’s potential for using reforestation as a climate mitigation tool, he cautions there are many factors to consider and that planting trees will never be a substitute for decreasing fossil fuel emissions. Is the concept of planting trees to help combat climate change really going out on a limb, so to speak, or might it take root? Sassan Saatchi, a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, believes it has some merit. The study attracted worldwide attention, as well as some criticism within the science community. That’s 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. By planting more than a half trillion trees, the authors say, we could capture about 205 gigatons of carbon (a gigaton is 1 billion metric tons), reducing atmospheric carbon by about 25 percent. They found Earth’s ecosystems could support another 900 million hectares (2.2 billion acres) of forests, 25 percent more forested area than we have now. The international research team, led by Jean-Francois Bastin of ETH-Zurich in Switzerland, used direct measurements of forest cover around the world to create a model for estimating Earth’s forest restoration potential. It’s an intriguing premise: what if we could reduce the severity of global climate change by planting hundreds of billions of trees to remove excess carbon from our atmosphere? A recent study published in the journal Science sought to provide answers by estimating the global potential of restoring forested lands as a possible strategy for mitigating climate change.
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