Some scientists from Switzerland tried to calculate how much carbon could be removed if we planted trees all around the world. They published a paper in the journal Nature arguing that if humans planted a trillion trees, it could remove one-third of all of the CO2 we had put up there in the first place. It was a dramatic finding that led to a lot of dramatic headlines. The way that the paper was being described in some articles, you would think that trees were some kind of climate change panacea, that they were the key to fixing global warming. [...]
Richard Lindsay is a scientist at the University of East London’s Sustainability Institute. “Everybody’s saying, let’s plant a million trees, let’s plant a billion trees,” he says, “Yes, I’m all in favor of that. But let’s plant the right tree in the right place.” Lindsay has personal experience watching a lot of trees get planted in the wrong place. Back in the 1980s, he saw firsthand the impact of a controversial tree planting scheme in Scotland that ended up threatening one of the most special ecosystems in the world.
In the 1980s, the British government started using tax breaks to private citizens to encourage tree planting efforts around the country. The goal was to boost the UK’s timber supply. And it was a really good tax break, especially for the super-rich. But questions started to emerge about where exactly these trees were going to go. In order for this to work, investors needed large tracts of undeveloped, unwanted land. And there was one place that met the criteria—it was called the Flow Country. The Flow Country is a vast open area in the far north of Scotland that looks almost like the arctic tundra. The best way to appreciate the flow country might be in an airplane. From the sky, it looks like a Persian rug—streaked with colorful sphagnum mosses and dotted with little pools of water.
No comments:
Post a Comment