Are refoorstation project alone sufficient to help the species ? why / Why not ? what more could be done
Answers
Reforestation can help reverse not one but two planetary crises. Reforestation offers one of the best ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, turning it into solid carbon through photosynthesis and storing it in tree trunks, branches, roots, and soil. And reforestation can also start to rewind the habitat loss that threatens the extinction of up to 1 million plant and animal species—one-quarter of life on Earth, according to a recent United Nations report on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Now a new study shows that reforestation can be cost-effective as a climate solution, too. Tropical reforestation can remove as much or more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a lower cost than many other “negative emissions technologies” (NETs) that might become available in the future. Tropical reforestation, together with avoided tropical deforestation, could comprise as much as one-third of a comprehensive and cost-effective near-term solution to climate change. These are the findings of a new study in Nature Climate Change of the cost of reforestation across 90 tropical countries that I conducted with colleagues at The Nature Conservancy and the University of Wisconsin.
Based on these findings, tropical countries should accelerate reforestation, and developed countries should step up international finance for reforestation, especially through provisions of the Paris Climate Agreement related to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, “plus” re-growing forests (REDD+). Read on for a more detailed description of our findings, their policy implications, and our study methods.
Reforestation is a cost-effective natural climate solution. We estimate that reforestation since 2000 is on pace to remove 103 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere between 2020-2050. Increasing the pace of tropical reforestation would remove substantial amounts of additional carbon dioxide at low cost. According to our analysis, a hypothetical tropics-wide carbon price of $20 per ton of carbon dioxide—around the current price in European and Californian carbon markets—would incentivize land users to increase reforestation by enough to remove an additional 5.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide (5.6%) from 2020-2050, equivalent to thirty years of greenhouse gas emissions from Kuwait.