The world has more trees than it did 35 years ago (2021)
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Additionally timber likes to make claims like "we plant 2 trees for every 1 harvested." What they don't tell you is that half the trees won't make it to the next clear, and often smaller/weaker/sick trees are culled before a full clear to make room for better ones to grow.
The GGW of Africa only has 1Bn trees so far.
So not as noteworthy.
I would imagine planting a forest 1/5th the size of The Amazon is the major driver here...
>What happened to Africa's ambitious green belt project?
https://www.dw.com/en/what-happened-to-africas-ambitious-gre...
Really? I can't imagine it's very big compared to agriculture, but maybe that's my midwestern bias? Do you have any figures handy (specifically for commercial timber rather than timber for other purposes e.g., hunting)?
> Additionally timber likes to make claims like "we plant 2 trees for every 1 harvested." What they don't tell you is that half the trees won't make it to the next clear, and often smaller/weaker/sick trees are culled before a full clear to make room for better ones to grow.
That sounds pretty slimy, but the headline is that there are more trees. If timber is driving it, I would think the bigger concern would be over the homogeneity of the trees and the incumbent ecosystem damage?
Lastly, I would guess (perhaps wrongly) that palm oil and banana plantations are driving the inorganic growth (I haven't yet read the article--shame on me, etc--so perhaps I'm speculating unnecessarily)
Like here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (where timber is a primary landuse) there have been some big fires, but they don't compare in size or frequency to the fires out west.
About a quarter of US land is dedicated to ‘unprotected’ timber. About ten percent of that belongs to one single business - https://www.weyerhaeuser.com/
Agriculture is a little less (about a fifth), pasture is a little more (about a third) - although that includes range land which is barely ‘land use’ at all.
We have some Weyerhauser "timberland" by us - I can say they are much more like intensive agriculture than forests. I wouldn't worry about replanting on them - you better believe Weyerhauser uses every square foot of their land to grow trees on.
Thanks for the fact-check.
For public lands, the timber industry is responsible for their own replanting, but it's largely irrelevant. More timber is lost to wildfire than logging every year, so most replanting falls on the Forest service anyway: https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reforesta...
Edit: Apparently this is all wrong and out of date!
While the NFS still owns the majority of forestry land in the West, it only accounts for a tiny portion of the overall lumber produced. From the CRO:
> Since the 1990s, FS timber production has decreased, totaling around 2 billion board feet annually since FY1999.56 In 2011, NFS supplied 2% of U.S. wood and paper products. The decline is attributable to a multitude of factors, including (but not limited to) changing legislative directives and related forest management policies and practices—such as increased planning and procedural requirements—as well as changing market dynamics for wood products, public preferences, and litigation.
Basically, it became too hard to log NFS land, so logging companies turned to private or state lands instead (and states set their own criteria for how private forestry land needs to be replanted).
Gotta wonder how much of that is because of the way they replant? (ie: spray with round up, and then plant GMO pine, eliminating fire break species like aspen).
Based on my conversations with the service (very large, multiple states, etc), most private land owners are hedge funds. They basically just hold land and lease it to the management services. No cost or risk to the hedge fund. Land values increase typically and they make revenue in the meantime. Further, many states have excessively low taxes for farm land and / or forestry so it’s really a decent investment.
Of course, climate change and human stupidity are very strong factors as well.
Having a fully matured forest takes hundreds of years. Logging it on a regular basis make sure this never happens and also reduces the overall carbon sequestration. This lead to the interesting conundrum which is that even though the actual number of trees is growing, carbon sequestration is going down in forests. (Apologies, unable to find the link about the carbon sequestration decreasing for decades, if someone has it please post, I need to bookmark it.)
Sure, but the number of trees doesn't matter so much -- the amount of carbon sequestered by those trees is more important. Presumably, thinning out the weak trees allows the stronger trees to grow larger.
The US timber industry is actually pretty good for sequestering carbon because their economic incentives lead them to:
- Select fast-growing species of trees
- Harvest the trees before they reach their terminal state (when they stop acting as a carbon sink), then replant new trees.
- Promote the use of timber products as substitutes for carbon-intensive building materials, like concrete.
There was an interesting life-cycle analysis of this published a few years back:
https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2011/fpl_2011_lippke...
Why is Timber harvesting bad?
As long as we don't burn the wood, that carbon is captured.
> Ultimately the study found that tree cover loss in the tropics was dominated by tree cover gain in other regions, driven by AGRICULTURAL ABANDONMENT in parts of Europe, Asia, and North America
If you don't live in a dessert and you stop doing anything to your land, and there are trees in the region - your land will turn into a forest eventually. In my region (central Europe) it happens in like 15 years :)
While it is good to know that we have more trees than we did 35 years ago, the biodiversity of coverage has been seriously damaged. This basically means we do not have that massive variety of trees anymore. A lot of trees we grow today are mostly coming out of secondary commercial purposes. I remember a huge forest in Cambodia was cut down and repopulated with nothing but an oil plantation which isn't necessarily a great thing. The ecological imbalance caused was great enough that animal numbers decimated quickly and never returned to the original level.
It might have helped offset some CO2 levels, but again, it had other adverse effects such as requiring huge amounts of water to keep it going.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River
EDIT: Ah! you updated to 45 from 35. That makes more sense.
If you don't, planting a rando tree in your back yard still does more good for the planet than not doing so.
Of course, it's political and 'we're not doing enough,' etc. but individuals have more influence over the Amazon than most things.
Great podcast on the subject: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/people-i-mostly-admire...
I was recently on the Amazon with relevant scientists and activists. There's a lot of work to do and little financial incentive.
If you're wondering, the best thing you can do as an individual, besides getting involved in international politics, is go do an eco-tour (or otherwise support that industry), provided you don't think the benefit is offset by the plane flight.
The people doing the deforestation need alternative sources of livelihood.
Sure, but if there are 100 relevant indicators that contribute to climate change or other environmental issues, and you're actively selecting the 5 indicators that seems positive and reporting on those regardless of the overall trends, that's not great (I'd argue that would be deliberately dishonest).
But sure, if you're just randomly curious about the trend in tree population and you look it up and it looks positive, then sure, I suppose you could be pleased.
Single species trees planted for paper is not the same as native trees and ecosystems that existed for 1000s years and that we keep destroying for some IKEA furniture
The US east coast has seen massive gains in tree plantings.
I wonder if the gains in the US offset the loss in the amazon?
~~100 years ago, kentucky had below 50% forest coverage, today it's over 90%, more than it's ever been in recorded history.~~
These numbers came from a speech the head of ketucky's forestry service gave to my college polsci class, they disagree with what google says is the truth. These numbers may be false.
I couldn't find the stat (I heard it on the radio) but there's this[1]:
> 91% of Scotland’s population live in 2% of its land area
Scotland does have large areas of barely lived on land but it's still surprising to see this stat, so I wouldn't think Kentucky's stat, even though I've never been there.
[1] https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/news/2022/91-percent-of-scotla...
For me an acre with trees on it isn't quite a forest (but I'd call it forested I guess) - somewhere between that and 40 acres is the boundary imo.
Meaning: a 4 year old tree in the Amazon is not equivalent to a 100 year old tree in the Amazon.
We might have more trees, but I doubt we have the same CO2 recycling capacity that we had 35 years ago.
Is canopy reasonable enough after a certain percent increase (say, 5% increase)? We are talking about percentages of the Earth's dry land, so nontrivial certainly.
Does not seem like an impossible task, I see two preliminary ways at least to attack the problem, but probably both will be wrong and is not my job to measure this without resources in any case
Ah, I misunderstood. I thought perhaps you had some insight here based on your insistence that canopy is a bad metric.
So canopy is definitely measurable at low-ish cost via satellite monitoring. I would presume it wouldn't be hard to add reasonable time-series based assumptions on new growth and make calibration adjustments that take into account the evolution.
Going into a forest and sampling, everywhere, is going to be cost inefficient relative to a model that can be based on canopy and calibrated on sub-samples of forest sampling, both historical and recent expeditions.
At least, that's how folks who would do this kind of job would likely approach it, based on my experience in similar domains. When it comes to funding, academia is a brutal place where resources are slim. Obvious adjustments are the next-best low hanging fruit to original development -- so a direct canopy measure would next likely be iterated to account for new-ness of forest and carbon sequestration calibration.
eg, Younger forests are not as productive as older forests when it comes to carbon sequestration.
Maybe not.
Disregarding cutting the tree down to just burn it for heat, obviously.
Big trees likely add more biomass per year than young trees
Does any life form on Earth grow indefinitely?
If humans don’t mitigate climate change and habitat destruction, life on earth will get a lot harder.
I’m sorry that the marketing isn’t convenient for you.
They are a storage of CO2. If we replaced all old trees with new ones we will gain a lot of potential for CO2 capture but at the cost of releasing massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere.
You are right. But I think that the point was to notice that we may have lost many good trees even if we are trying to add new ones.
Oil is predominately captured algae that died, sank to the bottom of the ocean, and was sealed in by salt deposits/other nonpermeable layers. Coal is carbon captured by trees, but it only formed in a relatively narrow period after cellulose evolved but before bacteria/fungus evolved to eat it. Oil will continue to form, but it's unlikely any new coal will form in the future.
https://firesafemarin.org/plant/eucalyptus
https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/ornamental/trees/eucalyptus...
The Amazon rainforest is a _garden_.
North America was deforested by humans thousands of years ago, and many trees were planted by people.
"Biodiversity" is an imprecise term in a way that muddles the broader relevance. We're losing previously _managed_ forest (high biodiversity in a way that's relevant to humans) and gaining "wild" land, which often enough is not as beneficial, even as merely a carbon sink.
The real story is that we've lost the ability to cultivate the land in a way that serves our interests, plus there are almost 8 billion people around now.