[InexSquirrel]

That's an interesting comment. I hadn't really ever considered that afforestation might be a bad thing - always just assumed "more trees = good". In what sort of examples would it be a bad thing? Trying to create forests in places that naturally weren't forests in the past?

[emodendroket]

Right. For instance, one story I read concerned disturbing grasslands in order to plant more trees — foolhardy because grasslands themselves are excellent carbon sinks and the trees would take a long time to be comparable. Others concerned trees being planted with little possibility of survival. I believe the first was in China and the second in Turkey if anyone wants to dig through news archives and try and find these stories again.

Obviously the problem here is people just setting “trees planted” as the metric because it’s easy to count and creating perverse incentives.