According to a new study the answer is yes.
Before you panic, the study isn’t anti-tree. It is merely pointing out that not all tree planting is environmentally beneficial. The key finding of the study that was recently published in the journal Science is that the benefits of planting trees may be overstated.
“Our study showed that there is a strong cooling from the trees. But the cooling might not be as strong as we would have thought,” said Maria Val Martin, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. and the senior author of the research article.
The study specifically points out the issue related to darker forests which can warm the earth by absorbing more sunlight and reflecting less solar radiation back into space. The term for this is albedo and it results in heat being held by the earth’s surface.
The researchers further noted that trees do more than reduce carbon dioxide. They also release organic compounds like isoprene and monoterpenes. These compounds react with various oxidants including the hydroxyl radical to reduce methane. Methane, as it happens, is around 80 times more harmful than CO2 when it comes to warming the climate. They estimate that these chemistry-albedo feedbacks offset up to as third of forestation’s CO2 removal benefits.
The gist of the research is that the environmental impact of trees is more complicated than simply their ability to reduce carbon dioxide.
Said Sassan Saatchi, senior scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, “the focus should be on not only restoring woods and planting trees, but also preserving current forest.”
He went on to say that the benefit of tree planting varies from geography to geography. In places like California sometimes preserving forests means removing trees to combat the threat of wildfires.
The moral of the story is that a more holistic approach is required, and that indiscriminately planting trees is unlikely to have as positive an impact as previously thought.
#treeplanting #methane #carbonemissions #climatechange #globalwarming