Averting Climate Change
In the Financial Times today they have a section called Ask the experts: Averting climate change. One punter, a David Wayne from the UK asks:
Given the evident difficulties of reducing emissions, why do we not pay much more attention to the possibilities of increasing net absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by new plant growth?
Tony Juniper, head of environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth is surprisingly downbeat on the potential for reforestation to absorb CO2, saying
We are in the process of releasing carbon that accumulated in fossil fuel deposits over many tens of millions of years. We can’t soak up all that with plants - even a lot of big trees.
Part of the problem is with land availability: there simply isn’t enough to plant sufficient new forest while also producing food. What we can do, however, is to try and halt the continuing loss of natural forests, which each year contributes more carbon dioxide than the whole of the world’s transport emissions.
We also obviously need to get very much more serious about energy efficiency and renewable power technologies.
Clearly Mr Juniper has never seen some of the new forests being nurtured by Forests NSW in Australia. We have lots of room down-under for new forests and they sequester a heck of a lot of carbon continuously. Some of the land being turned back into native forests was once cleared for farming but that farming failed and the land was left barren. The team at Forests NSW use the money from the sale of carbon credits in the form of NGACs to fund continual expansion of these forests. The trees are native hardwoods, selected for their appropriateness to the regions being repaired. While I do take the point that reforestation is not the only way to reduce carbon emissions, and lifestyle changes and non-carbon fuelled energy sources are a critical component in repairing the damage we have done to the planet, it remains a fact that trees are really the only reliable means of actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Mr Juniper is being very narrow minded in his rejection of reforestation as one of many viable solutions to global warming. — DS
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