In a cavernous theater lit up with the green shapes of camels and palms at COP28 in Dubai, ecologist Thomas Crowther, former chief scientific adviser for the United Nations’ Trillion Trees Campaign, was doing something he never would have expected a few years ago: begging environmental ministers to stop planting so many trees.
- The potential of newly created forests to draw down carbon is often overstated.
- They can be harmful to biodiversity.
- Above all, they are really damaging when used, as they often are, as avoidance offsets— “as an excuse to avoid cutting emissions,” Crowther said.
- In 2019, his lab at ETH Zurich found that the Earth had room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees, which, the lab’s research suggested, could suck down as much as two-thirds of the carbon that humans have historically emitted into the atmosphere.
- “This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date,” the study said.
- Crowther subsequently gave dozens of interviews to that effect.
- It also provoked a squall of criticism from scientists, who argued that the Crowther study had vastly overestimated the land suitable for forest restoration and the amount of carbon it could draw down.
- (The study authors later corrected the paper to say tree restoration was only “one of the most effective” solutions, and could suck down at most one-third of the atmospheric carbon, with large uncertainties.)
- He then brought the results to COP28 to “kill greenwashing” of the kind that his previous study seemed to encourage—that is, using unreliable evidence on the benefits of planting trees as an excuse to keep on emitting carbon.
“Killing greenwashing doesn’t mean stop investing in nature,” he says.
It means doing it right. It means distributing wealth to the Indigenous populations and farmers and communities who are living with biodiversity.”“
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Tree planting can distract from the greater priorities of protecting existing forest and reducing fossil fuel use, critics say.
___________________________________________________________________________________. . .And even if forests are restored and preserved the right way (by avoiding sapling die-offs, wildfires, or evictions of Indigenous people), such nature projects can still contribute to greenwashing if they’re used as an excuse by businesses or governments to continue emitting carbon as usual—especially if they end up being less effective at drawing down carbon than expected.
- The summit also moved forward on establishing rules for countries’ “non-market” investments in nature—essentially grants rather than credits—while failing to agree on country-to-country emissions-counting deals or a UN market for carbon credits.
- That will raise further doubts that carbon offsetting is the wave of the future.
Ecologists say tree promoters don’t do enough to highlight the negative effects of planting trees in areas that are naturally open.
But greenwashing is tough to kill. Norway’s $50 million donation to the Amazon Fund at COP28 sounds impressive—until you consider that the country recently approved $18 billion in new oil and gas projects, including by state-owned Equinor. (It’s estimated that the world needs to spend an additional $700 billion per year to halt nature and biodiversity loss.)
“If no one had ever said, ‘Plant a trillion trees,’ I think we’d have been in a lot better space,” Crowther says. “But maybe there wouldn’t have been so much noise and attention on nature, so that all the very responsible scientists who are here could correct it and turn it into something that is good.”
Updated 12-13-2022 2:45 pm GMT: The final three paragraphs of this story were updated to reflect the finalization of the COP28 agreement.
Scientists recently published the “10 golden rules for restoring forests,” which prioritize conservation of existing forests over planting.
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