Reforestation means more than just planting trees

The world is set to get a lot greener over the next 10 years. The United Nations has designated 2021–30 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and many countries, with help from donors, have launched ambitious programs to restore forests in places where they were chopped down or degraded. At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Egypt last week, the European Union and 26 nations pledged $16 billion in support of forests, banking on trees’ ability to slow climate change by storing carbon. A significant chunk will be spent on reforestation. “It’s a really exciting time,” says Susan Cook-Patton, a restoration researcher at the Nature Conservancy. “We’ve got an opportunity to really restore forests at scale, and that’s really encouraging.” But little is known about how best to achieve that. Between 2000 and 2020, the amount of forest increased by 1.3 million square kilometers , an area larger than Peru, according to the World Resources Institute, with China and India leading the way. But about 45% of those new forests are plantations, dense aggregations dominated by a single species that are less beneficial for biodiversity and long-term carbon storage than natural forests. Many reforestation projects focus on the number of trees planted, with less attention to how well they survive, how diverse the resulting forests are, or how much carbon they store. “We still know relatively little about what is working well or ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news