A good way to take part in increasing the number of trees, if you own your own home, is to improve the state of your shade trees. The trees absorb atmospheric carbon while also reducing home temperatures in summer, which in turn reduces the electricity people use for cooling. (And you save money!!) So a shade tree is a particularly effective way to reduce both atmospheric CO2 and electric bills. You might think of shade trees as cheap, biological solar panels.<p>Also, one can plant fruit trees in their yard. I put in 6 last fall and plan to put in another dozen in the next 2-3 weeks. Over the winter I added about 6 truck loads of wood chips to the yard to reduce water usage. (My general feeling at this point from working with the soil is that the wood chips reduce watering needs by at least 80% here. This is a form of xeriscaping, if you're interested.) With all this food growing in the coming years we'll be taking fewer trips to the grocery store while eating better. And probably giving away and trading a lot of food - we're already starting to trade for eggs from a friend, for example.
But, wait... some places are clearing forest for solar farms.<p>Georgetown
<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/01/georgetowns-green-plan-destroy-forest-solar-farm-is-met-with-resistance/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/01/georgetow...</a><p>Rhode Island
<a href="https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20190414/proposed-ri-solar-farms-endangering-rural-forests-environmentalists-say" rel="nofollow">https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20190414/proposed-ri-...</a><p>Prineville Oregon(I dont' know how many trees will be cleared for this, maybe it will be on existing farmland)
<a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2018/07/massive_solar_projects_will_po.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2018/07/massive_so...</a>
Studies on this are very valuable. The IPCC's AR5 advises this kind of action to be funded and analyzes different policy approaches to enable action.<p>There is no justification at skepticism and entertaining back-of-the-envelope gotchas about the climactic and environmental value of tree planting and enhanced forestry at this late stage. It needs to be supported !<p><a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter11.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...</a><p>" Reducing emissions from deforestation; reducing emissions from forest degradation; conservation of forest carbon stocks; sustainable management of forests; and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD) consists of forest-related activities implemented voluntarily by developing countries that may, in isolation or jointly lead to <i>significant climate change mitigation</i>. REDD was introduced in the agenda of the UNFCCC in 2005, and has since evolved to an improved understanding of the potential positive and negative impacts, methodological issues, safeguards, and financial aspects associated with REDD implementation. " (page 865)
Not to be too snarky, but my first reaction to the headline was, “<i>only</i> 1.2 trillion? What are we waiting for!”<p>More seriously, though: the article claims there’s “ample acreage” for such an endeavor but I didn’t see where exactly they’re referring to. Are we supposed to imagine these are sprinkled here and there around the earth, and that there’s plenty of space just waiting for a tree to be planted, or is this something where we need to create or re-create vast forest lands for it to work?
How many trees has been removed in total by deforestation?
Planting trees is a good thing, but at the same time there is deforestation. The deforestation must also stop.<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34134366" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34134366</a>
Earth's trees number 'three trillion'<p>"Scientific research has shown that there were once six trillion trees on our planet, and now there are around three trillion left.[1] Human activity was the main driving force for this decrease and humans can, therefore, be the main driving force in increasing it again!"
source: Trillion Trees Three major international conservation organizations – the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the World Wide Fund for Nature - UK (WWF-UK) and BirdLife International (BLI)<p>We probably also need to remake the economic system what parameters it optimise's for, so that it does not focus on exponential economic output growth as that will drive exponential energy consumption. Reasoning, the planet is already literally on fire due to global warming, why put more fuel on the fire?
It doesn't look like they factored in the CO2 emissions from planting that many trees.<p>The actual presentation:<p><a href="https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/23744" rel="nofollow">https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/23744</a><p>Under a business-as-usual climate scenario our model suggests that warming would drive the loss of ~55 gigatons of carbon from the upper soil horizons by 2050. This value is around 12–17 per cent of the expected anthropogenic emissions over this period.
This makes me wonder - could trees be modified genetically to handle more CO2 in order to make this number lower? Could we, instead of trees, have huge walls made of plants that would consume our CO2?
That's a lot of trees though and it cancels out only a decade.<p>EDIT: I just looked it up: there are roughly 4-10 trillion trees on earth right now.
Y Combinator funded <a href="https://www.pachama.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pachama.com/</a> in the batch of YC. They're building a marketplace of carbon credit to enable exactly this. They're hiring for engineering and operations in San Francisco right now <a href="https://angel.co/pachama/jobs" rel="nofollow">https://angel.co/pachama/jobs</a>
Just an aside, if you see campaigns such as "we have planted 2 trees for each widget you buy" you should understand that this is often in a forestry program where the new trees often get pruned or removed to make room. So a claim like "we planted 10k trees last year" doesnt mean much at all. the majority of trees planted in forestry do not survive. In terms of carbon a forestry program is neutral at best just replacing fallen trees and negative most of the time.<p>It's not the planting that counts, it's the leaving the trees alone.
"Trees are supposed to slow global warming, but growing evidence suggests they might not always be climate saviours." <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z</a> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19690382" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19690382</a>
I wonder if desert soil can be gradually converted to make the land fertile. That would definitely be helpful to convert a lot of land to plant trees which is currently of no particular use.<p>Any research or innovation on that front ?
So humans are pumping, each year, 100 Billion trees worth of CO2<p>100 Billion trees.<p>Holy Crap.<p>So if every household in the UK planted a tree in their (often non existent) garden, that would be about 22 Million trees - or about 2 hours worth.<p>Holy fucking crap. that's a lot of CO2
If the US share is 10%, that amounts to planting 40,000 trees per square mile over 3 million square miles. That is a square grid of trees, every 26 feet in X and Y, over 80% of the US landmass. Say what?
> Trees are “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change”<p>No, our most powerful weapon against climate change is reducing human GHG emissions.
My gut reaction to suggestions like this one is that it seems so hard to do stuff that is as geographically distributed as this. I mean, to plant a billion trees we need to find suitable locations that have an enormous area (twice the US per some comment here). The odds, I'm guessing, are that this will be spread among many/all the continents over multiple countries, involving so many local stakeholders and potential nimby/yimby-disputes.<p>In my mind a solution needs to be implementable in a meaningful way by single actors. I'm not sure about the state of the art of direct air carbon capture, but for me it seems like a much easier solution. "Just" push X billion/trillion USD into an enormous plant somewhere in a dessert with access to solar/nuclear power and suck it up.<p>Maybe negative emission solutions will turn out to be not feasible anyways, and the best we can do is to focus our efforts on reaching close to zero new emissions.
If there are seven times more trees than previously thought, as per the article, and 1.2 trillion would have this effect, then what effect does that have on climate models which counted sequestration by trees?
After reading a ton about genetics I wonder if it’s possible to modify one of our existing tree species to make them a better store of carbon without destroying wildlife habitats.<p>Entertain my thoughts: Suppose you could have a tree X. It grows fast, is very water efficient and better at trapping sunlight and C02 than existing specifies. It’s wood grows straight and makes a great building material. We could plant billions of it in semi-deserts and it would terraform the land into a livable habitat.<p>Basically the promise is rather than planting trillions of trees, can we plant billions of 1000x efficient trees in places where current trees don’t exist.
Until those trees die, then its all back again. Trees are just a buffer, and how much co2 would be produced mobilizing the planet to plant 1.2 trillion trees?
There used to be this series about "guerilla gardening" where people would throw all kinds of seeds in an urban area and weeks later it would be over-run with beautiful flowers. You could do the same thing to plant trees with a drone and even water them. Throw in some IOT sensors and incentives, and you've got yourself a crap coin for tree drones that might actually help the environment.
<a href="https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/</a><p><a href="https://onetreeplanted.org/" rel="nofollow">https://onetreeplanted.org/</a><p>anyone got any other suggestions for organizations to donate to to get trees planted fast ? Because I love trees regardless of whether they going to help save our home planet
An interesting idea I had. Obviously it’s destructive but maybe still a net win?<p>Go through every forest on earth and cut down every third tree and sequester it so it won’t decompose and release the carbon. Then the forest rengerates itself and pulls all that carbon out of the atmosphere.<p>Or an idea for a billionaire. Buy out the entire worlds annual output of lumber and sequester it.
The great thing about a million nay-sayers is they tend to drown by each other out. Almost all unintended consequences or downsides will play out, but in a Darwinian sense what remains will be the tractable part. Trillions of plantings will only leave behind hundreds of billions of trees but also millions of jobs and effective enriched lives and for every damaged water table depleted another will be renewed and remediated. The downside of inaction is staying depressed about a solvable problem. The downside of acting is dying on your feet not on your knees. The far more likely upside is succeeding in some places and learning everywhere.<p>I'm tired of the jeremiad of gloom from Eeyore. Boastful optimism is tiring too, but somewhere in-between is a nice place. Can we have some realism tempered optimism in our kids ability to un-fuck-up the last 100 years? Please?
Even though planting trees seems like an overall good idea (and I certainly believe so), I recall a recent article where scientists debated whether planting trees will have any impact.<p>From <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z</a><p>> Several analyses in the past few years suggest that these warming effects from forests could partially or fully offset their cooling ability.<p>What's consoling is that at least planting trees is unlikely to harm (although rapid tree plantation will certainly send ripples in the complex, inter-connected ecological chains).
Not cutting down rainforest, and encouraging their expansion again, seems a far better plan somehow.<p>The satellite images of continuing, and still accelerating, forestry loss were the most striking part of Attenborough's Climate Change prog for me.
I think we need a system, where the rest of the world will pay countries like Brazil or Indonesia to keep their current rainforests.<p>Currently, we are paying them to cut down rainforests and plant oil palms, so that we can buy cheap oil from them.
An easy way to contribute to tree planting is ecosia.org (more info at info.ecosia.org). We've already planted more than 55 million trees and won't be stopping there.
I made some rough calculations yesterday and user strainer corrected me: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701879" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701879</a> It would seem that even with his corrections and this article's data capturing carbon isn't feasible. 1.2T trees increases earth's forestation by 40% but only nets us 10 years of emissions. It seems very inefficient in relation to trying to reduce emissions.
People wonder if we have the space to plant these.<p>How about creating giant floating tracts of mangrove trees. They’re naturally able to live in saltwater.<p>Maybe make the islands out of waste plastic.
Yes! And you can do so at the tune of $0.10 a tree. To offset your CO2 emissions, you need to spend $15/person/year (if you're an American resident). I wrote a blog post about it here: <a href="https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2019/03/solving-climate-change-with-trees.html" rel="nofollow">https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2019/03/solving-climate-chang...</a>
I hope this is the American version of a trillion and not the British.. googles how many billions are in a trillion and got back<p>“In the American system one billion is 1,000,000,000 and a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 so one trillion is one thousand times one billion. In the British system one billion is 1,000,000,000,000 and one trillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 so one trillion is one million times one billion.”
So, to plant this many trees, you need Gene modification. The tree sapplings have to be toxic to sheep, heat & dry resistant, and they need to be non harvest able. You need to engieer a plant that is economically uninteresting for humans. Then distribute it via drones to the post human desolation.
<p><pre><code> Australia has announced a plan to plant a billion more by 2050 as part of its effort to meet the country’s Paris Agreement climate targets.
</code></pre>
Laudable, but a tiny fraction of the 1.2 trillion mentioned as offsetting a decade of co2, and over a period of 3 decades.
You don't cure cancer taking painkillers. You should both go after the symptoms (if they are bad enough at least, that they are now) and the root cause, because if you don't solve the real disease the symptom mitigations will be shortlived, as the patient.
For reference, there’s about 500 trillion square meters of land area on the planet; so even if trees are crowded together one per square meter, this is talking about a 500th of that.<p>But perhaps we can find a way to make the Sahara into a forest? That’s about what it would take.
I wish the government gives money or tax credit to home owners for planting trees, like X amount for first year and a little bit more every year for the next 5 years, instead of the punitive approach some cities taking now.
This is one global-scale geoengineering project I can rally get behind. It has the smallest chance of catastrophic second-order effects of any of the several methods I've heard of.
I wonder how increasing the forestation of the planet by 40% would affect the planet's average albedo, and by extension the solar thermal energy retention.
To put the number in perspective, that's a 40% increase in the estimated number of trees worldwide. That's a positively enormous increase, and would--by necessity--in large part be planted on and around existing agricultural land. That comes with a host of significant opportunity costs; just to start, population increases are projected to require a ~70% increase in food production from 2005 to 2050[0]. While there's a great deal of progress being made in improved agricultural efficiency and food waste reduction that will help lessen the environmental impacts of that increase, land for food production is still likely to directly compete with biomass plantations for carbon removal.<p>There are also recent studies that highlight some of the potential environmental impacts of large-scale terrestrial carbon removal as a primary mechanism for reversing the effects of climate change. Optimizing for sequestration means converting the most productive agricultural land or using even more natural land, devastating either food production or natural ecosystems,[1] in addition to drawing heavily on water resources and fertilizers on a massive scale, risking other planetary boundaries.[2] The more realistic scenarios risk both, albeit to less catastrophic degrees, but do so by decreasing potential sequestration and limiting its effects on global temperatures. Put a bit glibly, it's jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.<p>That's not to say that it isn't part of the solution. It is, as the first paper explicitly states in its conclusion, and "can significantly contribute as a “supporting actor” of the mitigation protagonist, if it gets started and deployed immediately." But it won't be a primary mechanism, nor will it reach anywhere near 1.2 trillion trees. Even the more limited "pertinent options available now, which include reforestation of degraded land and the protection of degraded forests to allow them to recover naturally and increase their carbon storage" need to be priorities.<p>Other geoengineering proposals, such as possible solar radiation management techniques, might extend the period during which we can use tCDR and other carbon removal mechanisms to mitigate past emissions beyond just slowing the rate of temperature increase. But without drastic emissions reductions in the immediate future, all of those possible options become more difficult, with even more deleterious consequences. Not to mention more expensive.<p>In other words, there's no easy or even optimal answer. Assuming, of course, that 1.2 trillion trees can be considered "easy."<p>0. <a href="http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/Issues_papers/HLEF2050_Global_Agriculture.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/Issues_pape...</a><p>1. <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a712/e761c2360f927cbff0ee54d64761bb5d0709.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a712/e761c2360f927cbff0ee54...</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0064-y" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0064-y</a>