Phantom Forests

October 17, 2022 6:21 PM

Too often, argues Duguma, tree planting is “greenwashing” aimed at grabbing headlines and promoting an image of governments or corporations as environmentally friendly. Tiina Vahanen, deputy director of forestry at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, noted recently that many projects end up being little more than “promotional events, with no follow-up action.Why ambitious tree planting and carbon offset projects are failing.
posted by blue shadows (11 comments total)

It is not a coincidence that tree planting gets pushed as a climate change fix, because the fundamental idea underlying it is to draw carbon out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis and turn it into organic matter -- NOT to do the much harder work of actually reducing emissions. As such, capitalists who want to keep the high emission status quo will go to anything that offers the illusion of fixing things without actually reducing emissions. For the same reason, you should prepare to start hearing more and more triumphal crowing about MARVELOUS EARTH-SAVING REVOLUTIONARY technologies like sulfate aerosols being launched into the atmosphere. Anything, anything at all that does NOT involve actually reducing emissions will be trumpeted relentlessly as the new cure-all.

The hard truth is that there are no substitutes for reducing carbon emissions, no matter how much capitalists would love everyone to believe it.
posted by cubeb at 6:37 PM on October 17, 2022 [16 favorites]

True, but once we put the brakes on emissions, we still need capture methods. There's some interesting stuff happening out there; I'm curious how this algal bloom method is going to work out out.
posted by phooky at 7:57 PM on October 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

I just googled "president [AfricanCountry] planting tree" and got a hit every time. Alpha males planting one tree pour encourager les autres is a bit like the imbalance of contributing a teaspoon of semen to the project of delivering a college age kid in 20 years time. Y' gotta provide water and keep down the weed for the first few years.

My sister lived several years in community on a bleak Scottish island. One winter they decided to plant some hundreds of trees mostly Scot's Pine Pinus sylvestris. They ordered up the whips, set out together and planted the trees across the side of a bare moorland rise. All the trees died. With 20/20 hindsight they realised that they could have achieved their aim if they'd spent 10 or 20 years at the task. First to identify a fold in the ground that was sheltered from the bitter cold salty gales of West Coast winter. It was easy to identify such a sheltered spot: you just had to look where there was a clatter of blasted hazel, willow and hawthorn. A few birch (fast growing, hardy enough to over-winter in Finland) and a few pines planted in the lee of the existing brush would, with luck and good staking, survive to provide a taller shelter belt for subsequent plantings. This would happen anyway with the natural succession from bog to boreal forest if you keep the sheep at bay. But there are ways of tweaking the natural process to bring it along a little faster.

Our half hectare of woods, fenced off & planted in 2007-2009, is doing very nicely, thanks. In the shelter of an existing hedgerow we planted ~2,000 saplings of Scot's Pinus sylvestris, larch Larix europaeus, ash Fraxinus excelsior and oak Quercus robur as well as a gallimaufry of native trees. Active support took a while with us having to give the tiny trees an edge over the grass, but then they took off and many of the trees are now taller than our two storey home. First thinning this year created some dappled glades and meditative walks. The ash is all done for with the die-back but they've served their purpose as fast growing pioneers sheltering the oak.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:31 AM on October 18, 2022 [16 favorites]

Kinda sounds like the Guinness book is an outsized driver of projects delivering quantity over quality. The planting initiatives I have participated in have nothing to with carbon offsets and do seem to have the planning and follow up required to maximize survival rates. But they've been under 5000 trees and over a couple of days.
posted by Press Butt.on to Check at 5:02 AM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah, these stunt mass plantings don't seem to have longevity in mind. We have a local organization that evangelizes the benefit of trees, plants trees in local parks, gives trees away to homeowners, and conducts educational events about selecting, siting, and caring for trees. They're playing the long game, and that approach is slower but likely a lot more successful at building a canopy than having hundreds of volunteers descending on an unsuitable spot, digging holes for an afternoon, getting their photo op, and never watering the trees again.
posted by Tuba Toothpaste at 8:05 AM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Forestry is a long-term kind of pursuit, and frankly humans are not all that good at projects that take that kind of time.

Not surprisingly, the tree-planting projects that eventually came to fruition were military in nature.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:14 AM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Continuity of care was somthing I have been trying to foster in our scouting organization. Too many community service projects are "one and done" and there is no follow up or any of the long term effort to face most real problems.

I've been trying to get buy in to pick a longer term project and have that project be sustained by younger scouts after mine have aged out, but it's been a hard sell.
posted by Dr. Twist at 8:35 AM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

LWT did a segment on carbon offsets a few weeks ago that went into these tree planting schemes.
posted by daHIFI at 5:49 PM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Any gardener knows that plants die. It's part of the process. Water, care, it doesn't matter- you are going to experience losses. Trees too - you think once they are a foot or two tall, they are conditioned to survive (they can be many years old by this point) but no. Failure rates can even be pretty high.

This is probably why lots of regular people hate gardening, because plants can be expensive, and the crap you don't want to grow somehow shoots up through small cracks in your driveway but that native plant you purchased, read the instructions, and cared for died like a frightened lemming.

What do you do? You plant again.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:19 AM on October 19, 2022

I'm not enough of a horticulturist to say that a professional rate of 15%-20% success are right, but as a home gardener, it's a bit low, but not that low. Yes, you could say the money is 'wasted', but yeah, that's why governments just put in cheap fields of turfgrass. It's failure rate is like 5% and it's cost are very low.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:28 AM on October 19, 2022

We need large forests for many reasons including their biotic pump effect. We definitely want more tree planted of course, but we mostly need to prevent existing forests being cut down. Any younger forests winds up less useful for ecology, biotic pump, etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:02 AM on October 23, 2022