Here, for instance, in Brazil’s Parque Nacional da Chapada dos Veadeiros?
Zach St. George’s New York Times article “Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World?” is an excellent overview of the reality of tree planting versus the ideal of it.
Among the reality-checks:
In the 24 national plans that had been made public by then — 61 countries now support the goal — nearly half the land involved was slated to be turned into plantations of fast-growing commercial trees. The carbon these monocultures store is mostly released in a decade or so, when the trees are harvested […]
Then there’s the debate between prairie and grassland ecologists and forest scientists:
Scientists who study savannas, prairies and other grasslands say the dispute is a familiar one. There are large areas of the world where the climate could support forests, but where there are not forests. Some of these areas formerly held forests; others did not. Grassland scientists say tree-planting advocates have tended to view all those areas as equally ripe for reforestation. These experts argue that such areas are not degraded forests, but rather ancient, biodiverse and carbon-rich ecosystems, worthy of protection in their own right. “There’s a peculiar forest fetish and obsession, which I think is traced back to Europe, possibly Germany,” says William Bond, professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Capetown, South Africa, who studies grasslands. “I think it’s a massive misunderstanding of the natural world.”
And the very definition of tree planting:
An even bigger challenge in trying to judge the collective achievements of the global tree-planting campaigns stems from the fact that people are not really planting trees, which offer a host of benefits and are famously tough, capable of surviving for hundreds or sometimes thousands of years and of weathering all kinds of trials and insults. They are planting seeds or seedlings, which offer few benefits and are not tough at all. “Seedlings are like baby plants,” says Lalisa Duguma, an ecosystem-restoration expert based in Australia. “If we don’t care for babies, we know what happens.” [. . .]
Seedlings die by drought, fire and flood. They are eaten, shaded out, stepped on. Often they die of simple neglect. The changing climate — which scientists predict will rearrange species and ecosystems — makes the long-term fate of any individual tree even more uncertain.
The point of the article, of course, is not that tree planting is not a good thing to do. There are plenty of examples offered of organizations who do it well — as “ecologically appropriate, climate-informed, community-centered reforestation,” as Jad Daley of American Forests puts it. It’s just that it’s more complicated than most people think, and that overplaying our “forest fetish” might not actually be ecologically appropriate.
