Forests Are Worth More Than Their Carbon, a New Paper Argues - Inside Climate News
Forests Are Worth More Than Their Carbon, a New Paper Argues - Inside Climate News
Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
Large-scale tree planting projects aimed at sequestering carbon are oversimplifying the many values of forests, researchers reported Tuesday.
In a peer-reviewed opinion paper published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, University of Oxford researchers point out that, although carbon sequestration is a valuable tool for climate action, large-scale tree planting projects often lack biodiversity, which can make them ineffective climate mitigations. The authors warn against using carbon as the sole metric for a forest ecosystem’s importance and argue that carbon sequestration projects need to expand their focus to encompass ecosystem restoration and biodiversity conservation.
“I’m not saying that we are against planting trees,” co-author Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, a Ph.D senior researcher at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute said. “But it’s just one of the things that we should be doing, and these plantations of trees have to have a very strong scientific base.”
Carbon sequestration is a growing global trend in addressing emissions: in 2020, the global carbon capture and sequestration market was valued at $1.96 billion and projected to grow, according to Fortune Business Insights. Monoculture—or single-species—tree plantations are popular and economically valuable vehicles for carbon sequestration because they can provide salable products like timber and palm oil. But reducing a forest’s value to the single metric of carbon overlooks all the other crucial ecosystem functions performed by biodiverse forest environments.
Aguirre-Gutiérrez studies the functionality of forests, and the most prominent trend he’s seen in recent years is the proliferation of monoculture plantations across tropical forest areas in Africa and the Americas, he said.
The paper draws on literature from the past several years, cautioning against an oversimplified approach to carbon sequestration and tree planting projects.