Week Fifteen: Reforestation/Deforestation Climate Politics

The planet is expected to warm by 3.1 degrees Celsius by 2100 without massive efforts to shift society away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources. As an article by Robinson Meyer points out (one of your readings for this week), all of this must happen on the existing 52 million square miles of land on the planet. For the most part, however, this land is already claimed. Land plays multifaceted roles in human society, supports almost all biological life, and is ultimately finite. These characteristics point to some of the contentious politics necessarily involved when land is seen as a key tool in mitigating carbon emissions.

Reforestation and deforestation have gained particular prominence in global climate politics for two key reasons. First, trees sequester tremendous amounts of carbon as a byproduct of their photosynthetic activity. Some trees also do this better than others: giant old-growth trees of the tropics, for example, can sequester as much carbon as one hectare of typical forest. Planting trees is proposed as a way of cleaning up some of the excess CO2 molecules concentrating in the atmosphere due to anthropogenic carbon emissions. One recent study, for example, proposed that trees could be planted on an addition 0.9 billion hectares of land. Forty-three countries have also already pledged to restore degraded lands to forest through the Bonn Challenge, a commitment to reforest 350 million hectares of land by 2030.

Second, tree clearance for various purposes is a key source of climate emissions. When trees are cut down and burned (or when they otherwise die and decay), they release stored carbon into the atmosphere. This is why planting of trees on a scale significant enough to change global carbon equations will also require maintaining the forests that are already standing. Enter REDD+, a major (contentious) proposition to avoid ongoing forest degradation and deforestation by paying for the carbon conserved through forest preservation (the subject of the ProPublica article for this read).

Take a minute to read about some of the contentious politics surrounding both of these propositions by engaging with recent debates from the popular press. Where do you stand after reading these articles? Do you think forests are a piece of the climate puzzle? How and under what types of arrangements?