How Reforestation Efforts Could Be The Key To Fighting Climate Change
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As we wrap up what's on track to be the hottest year on record, many nations are looking towards the future of our global climate. A key piece in determining that future, of course, is money. That includes setting up a method for developed countries, which have produced the vast majority of emissions, to pay for developing countries to adapt to climate change and prepare for climate-fueled extreme weather. That financing will be key to countries meeting their emission reduction goals, all part of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Another solution for meeting those goals globally could be out in the woods. Trees take in and store carbon. But could they store enough carbon, with a lot of help from us, to offset humanity's carbon emissions? What's the role of trees in our fight against climate change? And what's better left to other climate solutions? I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast, where we get to the heart of the story. We'll be back with answers to those questions and more in just a moment.

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And use code POD20 for 20% off your first product. That's business.landsend.com slash POD20. Code POD20. Joining us now from Bozeman, Montana, is Lauren E. Oaks. She's a conservation scientist and writer. Her new book is Treekeepers, The Race for a Forested Future. Lauren, welcome to 1A. Thank you for having me. Let's start with a basic, but perhaps not so basic question. What is a forest?

Oh, what is a forest? So many definitions. I think there's about 800 definitions of forest in the academic literature, but it's really a collection of trees, these plants that have woody bowls, and it's really those woody bowls that distinguish them from other plants. And that's probably where you want to go today is what's in those woody bowls, but it's the carbon, and that's where they store a lot of their carbon. Now, you said the scientific definitions vary. Why is there so much variation? Yeah.

Yeah, there's kind of a long history of countries and regions defining a tree based on various thresholds. You know, trees obviously vary around the world in terms of their stature and lots of other qualities about them. So typically countries in the past have defined, you know, a threshold and height and density based on what's typical in an ecosystem environment.

And then we have an effort globally to synthesize to one universal definition of what is a forest. And the reason behind that is so that we can get a real sense of the state of the world's forests where they are. Well, how does that complexity determine what we know about the health of the world's forests and the problem we're trying to fix?

Yeah, well, a lot of the really detailed tracking today is done by satellite. This is one of the fascinating things to take a deep dive in into my book. In my book research, we have satellites going around the world every day and tracking forest cover. And depending on...

the satellite and its resolution, you can get a real sense of what's in that forest. But a lot of that data is compiled with ground data that countries and regions and governments collect to truth what we see in a satellite. So what you may see as contours of broccoli in a satellite picture, it looks like a broccoli spear on the earth.

you know, take some data on the ground to then understand what actually is composing that forest, what is the health of that forest, are there infestations affecting it, and so on. What are some of the prime assessments you have to make to determine whether a forest is healthy?

Oh, yeah. Well, I spent a lot of time in Alaska before researching this book, studying forest die-offs. So I was looking at trees that were affected by climate change. There's other infestations. You know, there are infestations that occur from beetles and insects. There are fungi that can affect forest health.

But I was looking at a climate-induced forest mortality where the trees have been pushed to a climatic threshold where they essentially can't survive. And when you're doing that kind of work, it's really hard and physical and challenging. You're taking measurements of tree heights, looking at the foliage. Is it dead and dying? Is the foliage browned? There are a lot of different other...

metrics to use, but you're essentially just doing a census like you would do in a population of various health indicators. When you first started to write this book, what was the primary question that drove this exploration into our forests? Yeah. So in recent years, you know, planting a tree has become a catch-all for doing something good for the planet. And

And, you know, how many times have I bought some item, a T-shirt or maybe a holiday card or something, and it says, you're going to plant a tree from that purchase. If you open Google and do a search for tree planting and environment or tree planting and climate, you'll see a slew of headlines saying,

And they really paint kind of a controversial picture of trees can be the climate solution. Trees might save us. Or the scientists, you know, have it wrong. This could be a dangerous diversion from other work. And I felt like a lot of 800-word media headlines were painting a very black and white picture when the answer is probably more gray. And I wanted to take a deep dive into the complexities and, you know, to really try and answer with a hard look at how

To what extent can trees really save us and how? We'll dig more into carbon because you look at that basic fact that trees take in carbon, but it's about more than that. What else do trees do for us and for the planet? Oh my gosh, this was one of the most fun chapters to research actually. Because like you said, I kind of started with the question of what are the trees that, what's the potential that trees have

respect to carbon sequestration. But really, trees provide so many other benefits. You know, they have a local effect on weather. There's a cooling effect. They offer shade. I spent time in Seattle and Tacoma researching, you know, urban forestry and the effects in communities. And

Boy, there are some studies showing, you know, in Portland, for example, you can get a well-canopied neighborhood that is 20 degrees cooler in the summertime than one that doesn't have a lot of tree cover. Now then, if you think about, you know, the inequities that are tied to that, if you have elderly people in a community, they're facing warmer temperatures, maybe you have higher fan or electricity bills. There have been studies showing...

between test scores and tree cover in schools. So there's a national movement to increase tree cover around schools. Again, these are correlations, not always causation, but there are a lot of trends here that are relevant. There was a study that I came upon actually looking at the effects of terpenes. So terpenes are these compounds. If you go out to an old growth forest or you visit the redwoods in California, it has a certain smell and feeling to it. You are breathing in these compounds

these terpenes. And there's some research showing that terpenes may reduce your neural activity that's associated with anxiety. So they have a calming effect on us that we're really just, we're just scientists are just trying to understand and just starting to understand those linkages.

Lauren, I just have to note the connection between your last name and your chosen area of study, Oaks, and just hearing your voice and the way you are passionately in love with trees. Has this been a lifelong love affair or something you grew into? Yeah.

I started, you know, I think there's been a lifelong love, to be honest. My dad gave me an old, you know, retina camera when I was like 12 or 13. It kind of had that old lens that folds out so different from what our iPhones are today. And the first contact sheets, you know, I filled them with photographs of trees in my backyard. And then I started to take photographs in my neighborhood of trees.

that were cleared for housing developments. So I think there was that early impression and that early concern surrounding land use change, but it's just been a lifelong fascination. And I guess I would point out, I see it now in my son and I write about this, I think there is an instinctual awe that we have of trees, whether it's an old growth forest or a

maple tree on your street that someone's been caring for for a long period of time. People have been living in and around trees for millennia, and I do think they have an effect on us. You follow a number of people in this book. What links them all together? Great question. I think, I mean, the point of the book Treekeepers was that

We started with this idea that planting is possibly the solution. And really, if you're talking about a solution, how forests can contribute to the climate crisis and how forests can contribute to making our planet more habitable into the future, treekeeping is important.

Who's one person doing this work, a treekeeper as you call them, who you were most impressed by?

Well, there was a van, Andrew Coates, in Panama that I met. It was just a project that I visited on the Azuero Peninsula. And it was kind of towards the end of my research when I was looking for projects that were pursuing carbon certification, were backed by a company to some extent, and were delivering or aiming to deliver on more than just carbon.

And he was a project leader on the Azuero Peninsula in Panama, this amazing region that has howler monkeys and spider monkeys. And the forests there have been fragmented over time, largely a result of land use to agriculture and raising cattle. And now I saw cattle in the area. They're starving. They're not surviving very well because of the longer periods of hot, dry summers there.

and drought and not having like this green pastures and green land to eat like they used to. So people in that area are really looking to change their land use to something that is more economically viable to the future. And he was just an incredibly persistent person, you know, the kind of real champion who's bringing together lots of people with different values and

different histories of land use and bringing them together on a collective vision of what this region could be. Still to come, what will it take to reforce the world and why should we do it beyond meeting our carbon goals? That's just ahead.

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Now back to trees, what they can do for the planet and what we can do to plant more of them sustainably. You visited Suriname as part of your research for this book, Lauren. Why did you choose to go there? For the book, I talked to about 150 people around the world and it draws from both experiences, new and old. And Suriname actually wasn't one that I visited recently, but it was the first forest that I visited as a real intact, pristine forest.

And it was over 20 years ago that I went. I was in high school at the time. So it was really an experience in going back to old journals. Believe it or not, I've kept journals over all these years. And Suriname, you know, back then was home to one of the largest intact blocks, you know, what we call these HFLD countries, so high forest, low deforestation rates. They're not experiencing the rates that you see or have heard about maybe in Amazon or Congo countries.

And I write about it actually to answer some of the questions you started with, with what is a forest? Because experiencing that at a young age really imprinted in my mind what an incredibly biodiverse forest can be. I remember, you know, getting down on my hands and knees and digging in the dirt and this really just dark, rich, really nutrient-rich soil and the complexity of all the layers in the forest and the sounds.

But over time, you know, my definition of what a forest is and could be has also expanded. We need to keep those intact.

relatively intact, pristine, if you will, blocks for a lot of reasons. We can talk about it if you want to talk more about carbon. But now what is a forest? There's all kinds of forests across the world. The urban forest, our plantations. We have some fast-growing plantations people are planting with the sole purpose of sequestering carbon quickly.

what a forest is has really expanded and changed over time. Well, you kind of connect the dots for us historically by taking us back to the Carboniferous period. That's about 360 million years ago. And that's where you help us first understand what the

what the relationship between trees and carbon looks like and how it can help us understand the current potential of trees to store carbon. Take us through that early history and what it means for us and our understanding of the role trees can play today.

So, carbo, from Latin, coal, pharaoh, to bear, to carry. Carboniferous is coal-bearing, carbon-bearing. This period of time that I think is as monumental, or should be as monumental in people's minds as the Jurassic period, which people know largely for the dinosaurs. But this period is, in my mind, really proof positive that trees can sequester or lock up carbon for very long periods of time.

So at that time, you know, if you can rewind and imagine, you know, deep, deep time and processes occurring over millions of years, um, between 330 and 260 million years ago had the highest rate of organic carbon burial. Um, and that occurred in a world, you know, it was, it was Pangea. We had a mega continent. Um, think of those as like, uh,

essentially continents banging together and creating these mountains and also basins where you could bury organic matter. It was, you know, at times very wet. And there are these trees I love to describe to my son and maybe to anyone as the Dr. Seuss forest. So if you think of like the Lorax and Triphala trees.

They had these long green stalks. They could grow over 100 feet tall and be six feet in diameter at the base. They didn't have canopies throughout their life. They would grow, grow, grow, reproduce, and their canopies, these little fluffy canopies, would unfurl in their dying days. But these are the trees that also in time would fall over and fall into these basins, become buried in these wet conditions.

And for about 9 million years in time, so a long period of time, these hops and trees were the biggest contributor to what became coal. So I kind of love the full circle aspect of it, that there was the discovery of coal, where burning and fire has changed our world for both good and bad. But now here's a world turning to tree planting again and thinking about

could these trees sequester carbon and help solve this problem we've created? And, you know, also over what time period could they have an impact? Well, Earth used to have six trillion trees. Now we have about half that amount. And as you said, many campaigns for reforestation aim to plant one trillion trees. What baseline should we try to return to?

Let's just take a look at carbon and climate for a moment and the way that trees might contribute. So first of all, obviously other harmful gases are affecting the atmosphere. Methane, for example, has caused about a third of the warming since the Industrial Revolution, and the carbon is responsible for about a half. So we're already looking at a piece of the puzzle if we just start talking about carbon. Then on an annual basis, you know, 2023, our global carbon emissions were about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide.

Forests are existing forests. So places like the ones I've mentioned already in Suriname, you know, our stands in the Amazon, in Congo Basin, even our forests scattered across the United States in various settings. These forests are storing about a third of those global emissions, sucking them out on an annual basis.

So if you think of a service provided by Standing Forests, it's tremendous. We need to keep those forests doing their job. But then when you look at the numbers and all the estimates, and there's lots of different ones coming out of a lot of research teams and consultants around the world, we could probably increase that to about half through reforestation and through growing more trees into the future. So there's a lot of potential to contribute to the problem, but in

never is trees just the only answer. Oh, we got this email from Parker in West Virginia who says, I love forests. My favorite is a pristine forest called the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest. I would recommend experiencing a pristine forest or even old growth to everyone. Just incredible. What's the distinction there between a pristine forest and an old growth forest?

I think they're usually used interchangeably. And pristine, I would also say, I would acknowledge, kind of has this, you know, colonialist, environmentalist history of the idea that people weren't living in forests, but people have been living in forests and still are. And in fact, you know, some of the best stewardship of these intact forests that remain come from indigenous populations that are still living in relatively intact forests.

But old growth, pristine, primeval, all tend to be words we use for primary forests, long-lived forests that have not been recently planted or recently regenerated even through natural regeneration. We got this question from Diane who asks, where do the trees come from during reforestation? Don't they have to be dug up from someplace else to be put someplace else?

Yeah, I mean, that's another part of the complexity of our vision of a more forested future, right? As we think of planting as the start. I think it was one person at an organization called One Tree Planted who told me oftentimes people donate and then email the next week and say, where was my tree planted? Yeah.

And in reality, it takes a long time to source those seedlings, source the seed, grow seedlings, and get to a stage where you're ready to plant saplings if you're planning to plant saplings. That was a fascinating topic to research in this book. And it also points to the question about...

I think it was from Anna, about native species. You know, we have typically planted about 100 species, you know, commonly around the planet, tree species, when there are about 73,000. So if you're talking about leveraging this effort for more than just the climate crisis, we need to be thinking about planting a diversity of species into the future. Yeah.

So there are some real innovative efforts to scale up wild seed production and do that kind of work in different settings. So when it comes to talking about what these treekeepers are doing with forests, what terminology accurately captures their goal? Is it improving forests, restoring them, or something else?

Yeah. Restore, you know, in many people's minds, you think of restoring, bringing back something. Or in treekeepers, I describe it through the restoration of a painting. Like if we restore a painting, we have this vision, it's going to be exactly what that original painter created, despite the damage that has occurred to it in the time since. Yeah.

So in reality, you know, in a changing climate, in a warming world, we can't restore a forest to exactly what it was.

We also need to accommodate the change that has happened and the change that is coming. There have been some ecologists that have proposed the term renovation, which I actually really love. I don't think it's taken off that much, but the idea has. And that is, you know, we are imparting new vigor. We are bringing some life to. We are renovating and remodeling in some way. And that's what this work is too. Is there a renovation project that seems to be going particularly well?

that you'd point out? I mean, I think there's lots of different examples, whether you're choosing a small-scale coffee farm. I went to an agroforestry project in Hawaii, this woman, Riva and Johan, and I write about their mother, Virginia Norwood, who was also involved in the early creation of our satellites. But, you know, I think they gave me kind of a really...

what I would call my most romantic vision of where farming and trees are coexisting. You know, you're getting trees on a farm that are providing shade, bringing nutrients to the soil. And while they were doing this on a relatively small scale, there are examples of companies, you know, starting to do that kind of work as well. I think Nespresso is another example of trying this at larger scale. Let's pause here. After the break, how should we think about stewardship when it comes to reforestation?

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Let's get back to our conversation about trees with the author of Tree Keepers, The Race for a Forested Future. One thread through the book is the importance of upkeep because there may be a campaign that promises to plant a tree for a surprisingly low price. But what happens after is really important. So what does that upkeep process look like and for how long?

Yeah, again, it's hard to answer in questions that are one solution for the planet. And that's, you know, another message in the book is that we have certain values and goals and guardrails. We can have those values and goals and guardrails kind of guiding projects, but local context really matters.

So if you're talking about, you know, a tree planted in an urban community and upkeep over its life versus, you know, a native forest restored in a relatively remote area where people also rely directly on income generated from that land, there are different answers. Yeah.

You know, it was really fascinating to learn that particularly in urban forestry, a lot of money will go towards the planting act. You know, you can go down in some cities to, you know, a rep or an event and sign up for your tree and take home a tree for free. But then the care of that may fall upon adjacent landowners. So again, those adjacent landowners need to want that tree and need to care for it into the future.

In more remote places where people have been using the land in other ways, having economic benefit come from those standing trees is critical. And that can be in the form of non-timber products. So things like honey, for example, or lots of things you can collect and sell that aren't necessarily meaning you're clearing a forest area.

Or, you know, if you want to talk about carbon credits, coming from credits and crediting the carbon that those trees are sequestering over many years. So what I'm hearing you say, Lauren, is that from place to place, that upkeep process will look different. Right.

But when we're talking about these broader initiatives to plant trees, is human intervention, interaction, involvement beyond the planting stage, is that always going to be necessary no matter where you are? It may look different, but is it always necessary? I think you need, I mean, you need to get to a place where the trees are established, they're growing well, but stewardship to some extent is,

It's always necessary. If you think in the urban setting, you know, you can get branches that need to be trimmed or may propose a risk. If you think in, you know, a rural setting, you may have economic pressures or new developments that come in that, again, challenge that land use.

So there need to be, you know, policies or incentives or just a local support, you know, for keeping those trees into the future. Which also points to the title again, is I think that treekeepers come in many forms and I'm not looking for one sweeping policy that's going to

keep our forests in the future. But I think that we need a lot of different strategies coming from a lot of different kinds of treekeepers around the planet. We got this question from Christina in Massachusetts who says, tree planting might be a very good idea, but can any planting campaign compensate for the hundreds or even thousands of acres of trees lost to wildfires or brush fires?

Yeah, I think a lot of times wildfire, particularly in the American West, is brought up as an example of why planting trees or hoping that they sequester carbon into the future won't work. But I would say that it also emphasizes the need to care for those lands and reforest with climate resilient species in a climate smart way strategically. And also that's not a phenomenon occurring constantly.

So if you look in comparison in the eastern United States, we're seeing a lot of healthy growth and forest carbon stored over long periods of time.

I want to get to this last email from Christina, who says, with a changing environment, including extreme drought and heat, what sort of trees do we need to plant and what effort does it take to keep those alive until they reach maturity? And again, I'm sure, Lauren, as you would point out, this will vary from place to place, but what kinds of trees are treekeepers choosing to plant given climate change?

Yeah, I think whether you're in a place that has a lot of data about what kinds of species survive. So I spent some time in British Columbia where they're working off a lot of information over many years for their forests. And they have a really...

amazing climate-informed strategy of planting species out front of climate. So they're essentially moving them up a bit where they're taking seed from areas that have been, from trees that have been exposed to warmer temperatures already. So essentially those populations are better prepared for the future. But I would say as a general practice, you get a lot of, in a project that's engaging local communities as well, you get species that are

that people know are more resilient to warmer temperatures, to drought conditions. And those will be the kinds of species, generally speaking, that do better into the future. If someone's considering donating to or supporting a project that involves protecting or renovating forests, what questions should we ask to know if it's a worthwhile project?

Yeah, first I would say big answer is that trees are important into the future and they will be. And it's also not a partisan issue. We've had a really renowned support for tree planting efforts from Donald Trump under the prior administration to the Department of Defense to IUCN to people like Greta Thunberg.

that could really make a difference with effort. And the questions that are important are thinking about, you know, how will they be cared for in the future? What makes treekeeping economically viable into the future? And how do we empower local communities to help keep those trees? Well, that's Lauren E. Oaks. She's a conservation scientist and author of the new book, Treekeepers, The Race for a Forested Future. Lauren, thanks for speaking with us. Thanks so much. Pleasure to be here.

Today's producer was Michael Folero. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington, distributed by NPR. I'm Jen White. Thanks for listening. This is 1A. This message comes from REI Co-op. From early morning runs to last-minute trips, make time to opt outside. When you're ready, REI has your gear, clothing, glasses, and advice. Visit rei.com slash opt outside.

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