Plant forests, not just trees.

“Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.” A legendary catch phrase from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Chris Sacca says it all in the recent surge of tree-planting investments around the world; including the hugely successful #TeamTrees campaign that has raised over $21 million USD in just the past two months, accelerated by large contributions from tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, Tobias Lütke of Shopify, and Jack Dorsey of Twitter.[1]

Crowther Lab, an ecosystems research group based at ETH Zürich, recently published more data indicating that restoring Earth’s forests could be a leading solution to climate change.[2] This has been linked to the lab’s earlier work on global tree density to generate some inspiring if simplistic targets: 1 trillion new trees could store about two thirds of all the carbon emissions humans have generated since the Industrial Revolution.[3] That’s huge — tree planting “has mind-blowing potential” to tackle the climate crisis.

But here’s the catch; planting more trees doesn’t always grow more forests. And whole forests are what store the lion’s share of carbon, not just trees. If we’re betting on trees to secure a liveable future, we really need to get this right.

Working on forest time.

When it comes to climate stability, on average, 70% of the carbon stored in forests is actually stored in soil.[4] Forests are living systems dominated by trees but made up of a huge diversity of life; it’s the entire ecosystem at work that makes them so special and so critical.

Bringing forests back to their full carbon storage capacity means bringing back the full diversity of forest life. This requires continuous adaptation and investment in nature’s complexity over the long span of forest time — hundreds of years in most cases. Tree-planting is often treated as the final act of restoration, when in fact putting a seedling in the ground is only the first step. Solutions that allot resources to the full scope of forest growth over the long term, all the critical work that begins after a tree is planted, will get the durable results our climate needs.

Planting the right trees in the right places.

Poorly designed tree-planting efforts can actually do more harm than good. In Canada for example, where vast forestlands offer some of the greatest forest restoration opportunities in the world, the most costly disaster in recorded history — the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire — was made worse by earlier tree-planting efforts.[5] Spruce trees were planted in partially drained peat bogs surrounding the city four decades previous and this increased the severity of the burn. When the tree plantations burned much of the carbon they stored was also released back into the atmosphere.

As the climate continues to change, the growing conditions and risk factors for trees and forests also change. Forest restoration projects intended to reverse climate change must carefully incorporate long-term forest resilience and adaptation measures or risk becoming a greater source of greenhouse gas emissions than a sink.

Who owns the land?

The guardianship of the land on which a new forest grows is fundamental to the success of any tree planting investment, and if the status of the land is not secure, the future of the forest will always be uncertain. Similarly, displacing local food production or even people to grow forests is not an ethical solution. Research shows that Indigenous communities and other locally-based land ownership models achieve best results for protecting both forests and their carbon stores.[6],[7] The most important questions to ask of any tree-planting effort is “who owns the land?”

The climate responds to physics, not spin.

One of the most hopeful and powerful ideas of our time — an idea to inspire us and guide us through the climate emergency for the next 100 years and more — is that people can help put things right in the world by vastly protecting and restoring Earth’s life support systems, including forests. The idea of planting trees to save the climate has currency now, and is rapidly gaining investment as the effects of an overheated planet intensify. The next step in this change process is the hard work of bringing a good idea into reality — execution is everything and the stakes are extremely high. Plant forests, not just trees.

Learn more at www.forestsinternational.org

[1] Elon Musk Donates $1 Million To #TeamTrees, Changes Twitter Identity To ‘Treelon’. Forbes 2019.

[2] The global tree restoration potential. Science. 05 Jul 2019:Vol. 365, Issue 6448, pp. 76–79. Jean-Francois Bastin, Yelena Finegold, Claude Garcia, Danilo Mollicone, Marcelo Rezende, Devin Routh, Constantin M. Zohner, Thomas W. Crowther

[3] Mapping tree density at a global scale. Nature. 525 (7568): 201–5. Crowther, T. W.; Glick, H. B.; Covey, K. R.; Bettigole, C.; Maynard, D. S.; Thomas, S. M.; Smith, J. R.; Hintler, G.; Duguid, M. C.; Amatulli, G.; Tuanmu, M.-N.; Jetz, W.; Salas, C.; Stam, C.; Piotto, D.; Tavani, R.; Green, S.; Bruce, G.; Williams, S. J.; Wiser, S. K.; Huber, M. O.; Hengeveld, G. M.; Nabuurs, G.-J.; Tikhonova, E.; Borchardt, P.; Li, C.-F.; Powrie, L. W.; Fischer, M.; Hemp, A.; Homeier, J.; Cho, P.; Vibrans, A. C.; Umunay, P. M.; Piao, S. L.; Rowe, C. W.; Ashton, M. S.; Crane, P. R.; Bradford, M. A. (2 September 2015).

[4] Forests and Climate Change Working Paper 1: Instruments Related to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Their Potential for Sustainable Forest Management in Africa. Alain Karsenty, Cécile Blanco, Thomas Dufour CIRAD-Forêt, Paris, France. September 2002. English version Forest Products Division, FAO, Rome. March 2003. http://www.fao.org/3/ac836e/AC836E03.htm

[5] Wilkinson, S. L., P. A. Moore, M. D. Flannigan, B. M. Wotton and J. M. Waddington. 2018. Did enhanced afforestation cause high severity peat burn in the Fort McMurray Horse River wildfire? Environmental Research Letters, 13 (1). https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa136/meta

[6] Frechette, A., C. Ginsburg, and W. Walker.. 2018. A Global Baseline of Carbon Storage in Collective Lands. Rights and Resources Initiative. https://rightsandresources.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/A-Global-Baseline_RRI_Sept-2018.pdf

[7] Robinson, B. E., M. B.Holland, and L. Naughton-Treves. 2014. Does secure land tenure save forests? A meta-analysis of the relationship between land tenure and tropical deforestation? Global Environmental Change, 29, 281–293. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378013000976