Planting Trees to Offset Emissions Sounds Great, but There’s a Catch

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It’s not doable, and these governments know it.

This story was originally published by the Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Countries’ climate pledges rely on “unrealistic” and “extensive” amounts of land for carbon removal projects like tree planting schemes, a new report from the University of Melbourne said. 

A landmass larger than the entire United States, about 1.2 billion hectares, would be needed for countries to deliver on those plans, which largely ignore who lives on and manages the lands at issue, including the rights of Indigenous peoples and other land-based communities living in rural areas that rely on land for survival and culture. 

“Countries are loading up on land pledges to avoid the hard work of steeply reducing emissions from fossil fuels, decarbonizing food systems and stopping the destruction of forests and other ecosystems,” said Kate Dooley, the lead author of the so-called Land Gap Report and a researcher at the University of Melbourne.

Dooley and her co-authors, more than 20 researchers from around the world, reviewed governmental climate plans and other official statements from 166 countries and the European Union as well as public land use data to determine the total land area needed for planned carbon removal and ecosystem restoration projects. 

About 65 percent of the 1.2 billion hectares of land identified in the report would come from land currently being used for other purposes, such as agriculture, while the remainder would consist of degraded land identified for ecosystem restoration projects, such as the African “Great Green Wall” project aimed at planting trees, grasslands and plants across the continent’s Sahel region. 

Countries’ climate plans rely on a mix of emission reductions from sources like power plants and automobiles, as well as carbon-removal schemes and ecosystem restoration projects that reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by sequestering it in biomass like trees or by using new technologies to capture carbon and inject it into geological reservoirs.

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