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Language: en
Could restoring lost forests absorb
enough carbon to help slow climate
change? To find out, Tom and a team
built a computer model to estimate the
potential. So, we collect data from all
over the planet, and that can show us
there's about 0.9 billion hectares of
land outside of urban and agricultural
land where forests might naturally be
able to regenerate.
That's a big chunk of land that would be
able to capture a staggering amount of
carbon.
Calculations suggested that to capture
this carbon, there was enough land to
support an extra trillion trees. A
seductive idea that made headlines
around the world.
It just went viral beyond anything I
could have been prepared for. And I
think that alliteration, trillion trees,
was both a blessing and a curse. In one
way, it captured everyone's imagination.
Great, we bring back a trillion trees
and we're going to be flying. But the
downside was everybody thought that
meant planting trees. Somehow it it
wasn't about the forest. It was about
the trees. And that is where things
started to go wrong. It nearly finished
all of our careers.
Companies and governments were under a
lot of pressure to limit their
emissions. They saw this as a chance to
just bang a load of trees in the ground
and then they don't need to cut
emissions. The projects announced as a
result of our paper saying, "Don't
worry, we're going to buy up land and
we're going to plant trees."
In the rush to grow trees, people
ignored the supporting environment that
exists in a
forest. There are places on the planet
where biodiversity continues to thrive
and those places are by and large in
indigenous
homelands. Biodiversity is the sum total
of all of the organisms that are here.
And you think, well, why does it matter
in a forest which is selfgenerating?
You get all the different forms of trees
and the understory and the mosses and
the fungi and the birds all in
relationship. It's this beautiful web
that doesn't really exist in a
monocultural
plantation. When Tom's paper was
published, many quite literally couldn't
see the forest for the
trees by planting rows of single tree
species to capture carbon instead of
reducing carbon emissions.
This greenwashing is one of the most
insidious threats to climate change and
biodiversity. And through this paper, in
some people's minds, I'd become
synonymous with
greenwashing. I still regret how I
handled that
paper. It's the hardest thing to be
hated by people that you agree with.
All throughout Earth Month, PBS is
dropping new episodes celebrating our
amazing planet. And we wanted to tell
you about a new episode of State of
Change from PBS North Carolina, which
shows how rivers and flood planes are
being reshaped and restored to be more
resilient and provide better habitat for
native species. Links to that episode
and the full Earth Month playlist are in
the description.