The idea of covering the earth with trees to fight climate change sounds indeed amazing and path-breaking. Many people have bought in the idea of planting trillion trees around the world, and have even latched on it in the hope of reversing the harm we have done to the climate. Who know, maybe you also must have had this idea in your mind and would have wondered about its effectiveness. Well, the seemingly viable and feasible looking idea is actually no antidote to climate change, rather it will further add fuel to the already raging fire. Planting a trillion trees on the Earth is certainly one of the delusional solutions for mitigating climate change.
First reason why a trillion tree plantation began somewhere from a paper in Science journal by by Timothy Crowther, a 33-year-old assistant professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He and his team developed models using variables such as soil quality and other factors, and suggested that there was plenty of room on the Earth for a trillion new trees on the planet. Crowther claimed that those trees could absorb two-thirds of the CO2 which humans have polluted the atmosphere with. The message that was conveyed by Crowther was that tree planation is “our most effective climate change solution.”
No wonder it gained popularity among the climate activists and policymakers, as much with eminent institutions. The basic premise has been that 3 trillion or so trees which are anyways growing on the planet suck up around 33% of the CO2 we dump into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. What more is needed is to spruce it up and plant 1 trillion more trees to suck up the Carbon Dioxide that is causing havoc to climate and get the planet back in order.
Sounds good, doesn’t work! Especially after what similar initiatives after 1995 Kyoto Protocol and 2015 Paris Agreement have shown us.
Though the World Economic Forum’s One Trillion Tree initiative and Marc Beinoff’s initiative works on this philosophy, planting a trillion trees will lead to massive problems on the climate front itself. First is the issue of permanence. How long will the carbon stay stuck in the forests? A fifty or hundred years? Well, we can never be sure, as wildfires, diseases, droughts and tree logging activities by humans will anyways return the carbon to the air. Second is the issue of bio-waste. The death of trees will lead to biomass landing on the Earth and staying there. In normal circumstances, that biomass would turn to organic manure. However, with a trillion more trees coming up on the planet’s surface, the increase in biomass from the dying trees will lead to a burden on the soil. Moreover, the additional trees will put pressure on the nutrient content of the soil, which will lead to distribution and fragmentation of nutrients among a higher tree population.
The severe 2011–2015 drought in California killed an estimated 140 million trees and turned the state’s ecosystems from a carbon sink into a carbon source — dead and dying trees in California contributed about 600 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, which is about equal to 10 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions over that period.
Source: Rollingstone
Adding to this, the infestations of bark beetles, which is a voracious tree-devouring insect amped up by rising temperatures, will be deleterious to forests and they have already killed billions of trees across millions of acres of land in the past two decades. Large regions of the Canadian boreal forest have been converted from a carbon sink to a carbon source. This way, forests can become the new climate crisis accelerant. Earth-system model projections built over the 21st century highlight that terrestrial ecosystems (including forests) could sequester as much as 36.7 billion tons of CO2 a year – or, in a high CO2 emissions scenario, release as much as 22 billion tons.
This does not mean to say that planting trees is bad. Not for a moment, we intend to discourage you from planting the next tree in your neighborhood. However, the said impact of the initiative may not turn out to be as colossal as it is made to look like. Tree plantation is good and helpful, but putting the figure at a trillion makes the idea too good to be true.
