We can, and we certainly should, but that does not solve the problem because those trees will eventually die and that carbon will cycle back through the biosphere. Mankind extracted a ton of carbon from the ground, where it was locked away, and we put it back into the air. People are trying to find ways of putting all that extra carbon back somewhere where it won't affect the cycles in nature. Trees just temporarily lock up carbon.
Stopping deforestation and massively boosting reforestation is one of the most effective things we can already do at scale. At this point we also need active carbon capture and significant reduction in emissions too, though - a multi-pronged approach.
Trees in forests are self-replicating. When one dies another grows in its place.
Yes, this isn't the only solution, but it's certainly part of the solution.
You've accomplished everything other sequestration technology promises, but you've done so in a way that is environmentally friendly.
This paper has some interesting ideas: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
My approach would be to find the best CO2/$ types of trees, buy them straight from the lumber industry, and sequester them in no-longer-used quarries. Just need to figure out a scalable way to ensure anaerobic conditions to help prevent CO2 release on breakdown.
I would think that a proper solution would require figuring out how to get all that carbon into a chemical form that is chemically stable and won't biodegrade. The ideal looks a whole lot like coal, I'd guess?
For example an old coal mine and then seal it.
Old coal mines are too dangerous for humans to enter so you need some kind of robotics to load them up with trees and other biomatter to bury.
Western USA has had a "fire season" for every year for the last like 4 years. Last year, other places like Brazil and Africa join in on the fun.
So planting trees without a robust animal/insect ecosystem to decompose them before they combust is an incomplete solution.
AFAIK coal is composed mostly of trees that fell back before microbes evolved that could eat through their cellulose walls, and have had millennia of underground compression to further increase their stability - basically that process isn't available naturally to trees that fall today.
Trees aren't the complete solution and the reason why has nothing to do with the tree dying and releasing the carbon.
What's going on here is that plants are converting CO2 into mass. A tree that isn't growing isn't creating new mass and therefore isn't lowering carbon in the atmosphere.