[CuriousCosmic]

I don't think the paper you posted disagrees with OP.

Tree planting can be a reasonable force of good for dealing with climate change however it needs to be done in such a way that the local ecosystem (both currently and in the targeted "restored state") is sustainable and able to survive with minimal human management in the long term.

And importantly, tree planting is only a viable solution of carbon offsetting as long as it isn't harming or displacing the local communities.

A good example of this is Tentree/Veritree's efforts. Restoring the heavily logged Mangrove forests on the coasts of Kenya, Madagascar, and in Indonesia recreates the local ecosystems for animals, fish, insects, and plants that live in marshes while also rebuilding the natural sea wall that protects inland areas from flooding due to weather. It's a good carbon sequestration project while more importantly serving to repair local ecosystems and reduce the impacts of further climate change on the local residents. Importantly these projects also focus on educating the locals on responsible forest management so that they can continue to harvest lumber for construction purposes without impacting the ecosystem or the sustainability of the recreated marshlands.

You can have good tree planting but it's more than just sticking saplings into the ground. Plenty of projects do really good work with the money they get towards forest restoration and most importantly these projects don't serve solely to offset environmental costs in western society but rather to repair ecosystems of disadvantaged regions and help protect these communities against the oncoming threat that is climate change.

TLDR: Tree planting as "more tree == less carbon" is obviously ineffective but in the bigger picture tree planting efforts can really make a difference as long as you put a modicum of research into what projects you are funding.

[RosanaAnaDana]

Thank you for making the point more clearly. Something I want to highlight is how little we actually know about how carbon cycling works in most of the Earth's ecosystems. Even just the uncertainty around carbon residency is something we understand very poorly in a broad geographic context. The answer is that we really don't know what most ecosystems potential is for carbon sequestration; and the critism I'm making is that just because we have high uncertainty around a system, doesn't mean we shouldn't consider it as a viable path, especially when it's probably the easiest to implement thing we can do with a wide range of well established cobenefits.

[dspoka]

My main qualm with the parent comment was this in particular, "Number one, is that forests work as long term carbon storage and sinks." Even with the surrounding context it sounded like this strategy will just "work".

The example you give with mangroves is a great one which does in fact work. Pragmatically and historically most of the attempts however, have not due to mismanagement and other unseen complications.

Seeing the further comments I see the point the parent was making is more around first principles of Forrests as carbon sinks not about its implementations.

[RosanaAnaDana]

>The example you give with mangroves is a great one which does in fact work. Pragmatically and historically most of the attempts however, have not due to mismanagement and other unseen complications.

You need to cite this if you are going to keep making that statement. I'm not arguing that markets are well implemented, that common practice is well defined or even very useful, or that we're even prioritizing for the right outcomes, but the notion that forests don't sequester carbon over significant time horizons is 100% false. Global forests represent the most significant, straightforward opportunity for removing carbon from the atmosphere, no debate. Yes we need to do better at managing them from a climate change perspective (good fire, biodiversity, water), but there is simply no better option right now for doing any kind of meaningful drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere than forests.