Part Four / What We’ve Done About It

4.7 How Can Forests Help Us?

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All online sources accessed on

  1. storing about two times more than the atmosphere Arneth, A., et al., ‘Framing and context’, in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change and Land: An IPCC Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems, ed. P. R. Shukla et al., 2019, https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/.

    around 13.2 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent … per year Friedlingstein, P., et al., ‘Global carbon budget 2020’, Earth Systems Science Data, 12 (4), 2020: 3269–340, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-3269-2020.

    this expansion is often driven by industrial monoculture forests Le Noë, J., et al., ‘Altered growth conditions more than reforestation counteracted forest biomass carbon emissions 1990–2020’, Nature Communications, 12, 2021: Article 6075, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26398-2.

    By the early nineteenth century, forests … had become heavily depleted Gingrich, S., et al., ‘Forest transitions in the United States, France and Austria: dynamics of forest change and their socio-metabolic drivers’, Journal of Land Use Science, 17 (1), 2022: 113–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/1747423X.2021.2018514.

  2. responsible for land-use emissions of 2.4Gt CO2 equivalent per year Hong, C., et al., ‘Global and regional drivers of land-use emissions in 1961–2017’, Nature, 589 (7843), 2021: 554–61, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03138-y; Arneth, ‘Framing and context’.

    carbon stocks of managed forests are considerably lower Erb, K.-H., et al., ‘Unexpectedly large impact of forest management and grazing on global vegetation biomass’, Nature, 553 (7686), 2018: 73–6, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature25138.

    This ‘lifetime’ … is typically about fifty years Luyssaert, S., et al., ‘Old-growth forests as global carbon sinks’, Nature, 455 (7210), 2008: 213–15, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07276.

    this ‘parity time’ may take … centuries Erb, K.-H., et al., ‘Changes in perspective needed to forge “no-regret” forest-based climate change mitigation strategies’, GCB Bioenergy, 14 (3), 2022: 246–57, https://doi.org/10.1111/gcbb.12921.

    the mass of human-made artefacts already exceeds Elhacham, E., et al., ‘Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass’, Nature, 588 (7838), 2020: 442–4, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5

    the focus should rather shift towards reducing the use of resources Creutzig, F., et al., ‘Beyond technology: demand-side solutions for climate change mitigation’, Annual Review of Environmental Resources, 41, 2016: 173–98, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-110615-085428

    In the EU, currently about a quarter to a third of all wood harvested Camia, A., et al., The Use of Woody Biomass for Energy Production in the EU, European Commission Joint Research Centre, 2021, https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC122719.

    EU legislation treats forest bioenergy as sustainable Searchinger, T. D., et al., ‘Europe’s renewable energy directive poised to harm global forests’, Nature Communications, 9, 2018: Article 3741, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06175-4.