Why Planting More Trees Cannot Solve Our Climate Crisis

Reuters

Why Planting More Trees Cannot Solve Our Climate Crisis

The fact is that there aren’t enough trees to offset society’s carbon emissions – and there never will be.

Viewing forests as reservoirs for biodiversity, rather than simply storehouses of carbon, complicates decision making and may require shifts in policy. I am all too aware of these challenges. I have spent my entire adult life studying and thinking about the carbon cycle and I too sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees. One morning several years ago, I was sitting on the rainforest floor in Costa Rica measuring CO₂ emissions from the soil – a relatively time intensive and solitary process.

As I waited for the measurement to finish, I spotted a strawberry poison dart frog – a tiny, jewel-bright animal the size of my thumb – hopping up the trunk of a nearby tree. Intrigued, I watched her progress towards a small pool of water held in the leaves of a spiky plant, in which a few tadpoles idly swam. Once the frog reached this miniature aquarium, the tiny tadpoles (her children, as it turned out) vibrated excitedly, while their mother deposited unfertilised eggs for them to eat. As I later learned, frogs of this species (Oophaga pumilio) take very diligent care of their offspring and the mother’s long journey would be repeated every day until the tadpoles developed into frogs.

It occurred to me, as I packed up my equipment to return to the lab, that thousands of such small dramas were playing out around me in parallel. Forests are so much more than just carbon stores. They are the unknowably complex green webs that bind together the fates of millions of known species, with millions more still waiting to be discovered. To survive and thrive in a future of dramatic global change, we will have to respect that tangled web and our place in it.

This article was first published by The Conversation and is being republished via a Creative Commons license.

Image: Reuters.