By: Katie Koenig (Sustainability Research Fellow)
In the last Tech Series post, I focused on technological innovations and strategies for carbon capture in the energy sector. This time, I’ll be looking into another method of carbon capture, this one more based in natural resources and ecosystems rather than high-tech solutions. Specifically, I will detail our forests’ function as natural carbon sequestration areas and how we can best use them to our advantage in our current climate.
Globally, forests are responsible for absorbing one third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and are home to 80% of all land wildlife, according to the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF).1 WWF’s new set of forest-specific assessments, planned to continue periodically until 2030, look into the current progress of forest restoration and preservation goals established by the the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership (FCLP), which formed during the 2022 Conference of the Parties, and present the first ever global plan on reforestation efforts.1
To put it simply, plants take in CO2 which they convert with water in order to make sugar for their growth. As a waste byproduct, they create oxygen and expel it into the atmosphere. Another byproduct, carbon, is stored in the plant itself and especially its roots, thus acting like a natural carbon sequestration site.
Innovations
A decades-long study in tropical forest restoration in Malaysia presents evidence that human aid with forest restoration provides for a more diverse, dense, and stable forest ecosystem, and potentially even greater carbon sequestration capabilities as a result. Human aid can include planting a greater diversity of seeds, which results in a greater biomass, or the amount of vegetation, in a forest. The leading theory for this is that a diversity in tree species means that more trees can grow in smaller spaces because they don’t compete for resources but rather target different niches to coexist. Also, human intervention with cutting away parts of thorny low vegetation gives trees more space to grow, and seed dispersal helps if certain species of trees native to a particular area have poor natural seed dispersal.2
The Arbor Tree Foundation works with different local organizations to collect donations and have community volunteers to plant trees in at-risk areas. They determine priority locations using their Forest Priority Index, which takes advantage of environmental data to define key regions where replanting has the biggest impact for combating climate change and promoting biodiversity.
Also, you may have encountered Ecosia before which promotes itself as the search engine that plants trees. It is a nonprofit organization that uses all of its revenue towards maintaining its organization, planting trees, and additional related costs, with full transparency of its finances and tree planting efforts. In the U.S, efforts are concentrated in the Withlacoochee State Forest in Florida, Northern California to combat wildfire devastation, and in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, which was also harmed from a recent major wildfire.
Policies
According to WWF’s Forest Pathways Report there was at least one hundred times more public funding supporting environmentally harmful substances like oil extraction than on forest preservation and restoration in 2022. Multiple millions of hectares of global forest were lost in 2022 alone, although there were positive forest efforts in specific areas like in the Khata Forest Conservation Area in Nepal, which expanded to the equivalent of three thousand football fields.1
The WWF report, in conjunction with the annual Forest Declaration Assessment, explains that countries must reform their policies and industries, in addition to restricting trade, in order to limit deforestation related to industries. It presents a due diligence system as well to hold countries accountable for the agreements they signed during COP26, especially related to supply chains and financial service industries that promote and facilitate investments in industries linked to deforestation to produce commodities.1
Additional regional regulations, particularly in Massachusetts, relate to Massachusetts’ Piping Plover Habitat Conservation Plan. Piping Plovers are a state and federally threatened shorebird, and this plan focuses on Piping Plover conservation through a variety of actions like maintaining and improving public access to local beaches and limiting recreational impacts on shorebird nests, among others. A few particular examples of the actions taken are reduced fencing in beaches to avoid nesting habitats and escorting vehicles past Piping Plover broods twice per day to avoid undue influence on their environments.3
Learn More
There are plenty of Youtube documentaries going into individuals and organizations restoring forest land across the globe. One such documentary covers the efforts of an individual’s nature reserve in New Zealand. National Geographic also showcased a short film on one person’s forest restoration project in Texas that details the impact of this restoration and how it is being used as an example for further conservation and restoration efforts across the U.S.
Resources