Adding 1B hectares of forest could help check global warming

[dang]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360513

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859

[hirundo]

I just heard Paul Stamets say that soil is around 30% fungal mass, dead and alive, and that makes fungus the greatest repository of carbon in the biosphere. So to sequester a maximum amount of carbon maybe we should be optimizing for fungus rather than trees. Is a forest the best way to do that? Trees do have a lot of surface area for fungal growth. If so maybe we should be selecting kinds of trees to plant based on their fungal friendliness.

[manifestsilence]

That makes me think prairie may compete well with forests in effectiveness. Many prairie plants have 10' roots or more, and the root systems are dense. Over time they do quite a bit for the soil and sequester a lot of biomass.

[tsar_nikolai]

forests are known to support huge fungal networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network

[sampo]

Some scientists are criticizing that the authors have maybe 2× overestimated.

https://twitter.com/SimonLLewis/status/1147114505949855744

https://twitter.com/pepcanadell/status/1147066574299377664

[tsar_nikolai]

Interesting! What's interesting to me as well, is that despite their criticism, both scientists do seem to support the opinion that it is an extremely important measure to add to our portfolio of climate measures.

[ishtanbul]

one important aspect in this is that forests have lower albedo than grassland. This means they absorb more solar radiation. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z

[ars]

You can take this a step further and just cut down trees, bury them in the ground and let new trees grow.

Do your part, and don't recycle paper, instead make sure to bury it. (I'm only sort of kidding.)

[manifestsilence]

That's an important point - where those trees go when they die is part of the puzzle. Systems thinking is important. When a tree decays, I wonder how much carbon goes into the soil vs. into the air. What about when a forest fire goes through? More frequent controlled burns help prevent catastrophic forest fires, but do they cause a smaller or larger overall co2 release? On the one hand, a firestorm causes entire trees to explode that would otherwise survive with little damage. On the other hand, frequent burns might burn material that would otherwise decay into soil...

[MertsA]

Any paper in a landfill is going to decompose back into CO2. You'd be better off recycling it and reducing demand for lumber.

[neals]

So does anybody here know how to make a 2%+ revenue from running a forest?

[lazyjones]

Apparently you can get "Gold Standard Land Use and Forests" certification for your forest and sell carbon credits for $18 USD/tonne or so to polluters.

https://www.goldstandard.org/luf

Here they calculate carbon benefit for 7500 hectares in Cameroon, which appears to be ~3 million tonnes annually:

https://www.cifor.org/fctoolbox/download/Topic-4-Section-D.p...

($7200/hectare annually seems like a lot of money to me...)

[bparsons]

Sustainable forestry is not a particularly complicated business, and if you are selling the wood for buildings etc. the carbon is not released back into the atmosphere for quite some time.

A lot of jurisdictions are looking at updating building codes so you can use treated wood for larger construction projects. If this was done in a number of large markets, it could reduce demand for concrete, which is the number two contributor to GHG emissions.

UBC completed a wooden 18 story apartment building a couple years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G22kYhaT-h4

[anon1m0us]

Ziplines? Tree houses? Truffles? Exotic Mushrooms? Hunting? Exotic woods? Food Forests?

[geogra4]

would be possible with a global cap/trade system with real enforcement mechanisms

[biql]

Forest bathing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_bathing?oldid=487393303

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.afforestt.com

[jefft255]

Sustainable forestry practices (selective thinning and cutting)?

[ajharrison]

Ending the factory farming animal agriculture industry is the only long term solution.

[etrautmann]

This may be one component, but certainly not sufficient

[boxcardavin]

I've done this math before and it's not encouraging. Global carbon fuel burning is more than two cubic miles annually. A billion trees will capture about a trillion kgs of carbon over 10-20 years, but yearly we're burning about 4 trillion kgs of just crude oil.

[tsar_nikolai]

1B hectares of trees supports approx. 1T trees. As with everything, it will not be the solution to climate change and has to live alongside other measures. But it is one of the cheapest (in terms of money) and least radical (in terms of lifestyle adaption) measures we can take for the effect it will have. This study shows that the earth has enough space. It will require a shift in priority for many governments (e.g. Brasil) though.

[ssijak]

1B hectares od trees is much different than 1B trees