Science and scientific research help us understand the important role of trees for carbon capture, and the conditions and required scale of tree planting locally and globally in order to maximize their beneficial role for humans and the environment. Carbon capture is an important part of the overall long-term solutions that are needed on global warming and climate change. For more on this, check out What on Earth: CBC Weekly newsletter: How You Can Be Part of the Global Tree Planting Effort, at http://www.https://bit.ly/2PoFomA.

Scientists and leaders at the recent September 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit say “the pace of climate action must be rapidly accelerated”.  https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/un-climate-summit-2019.shtml. Some countries are getting this message and stepping up. Organizations such as the Trillion Tree Campaign are taking note. On their Roll of Honour Top 10 tree-planting countries, they list China as number one, at 2.8 billion trees planted to-date, and Ethiopia at number three with 1.7 billion trees planted since the Campaign’s launch in 2006. See the full list at: https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/ or check out Wikipedia’s description of this worldwide Campaign at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_Tree_Campaign.

We found OneTreePlanted at www.onetreeplanted.org, to be another useful source of information on tree planting initiatives around the world, including in Canada, and ways for getting involved. OneTreePlanted is a non-profit organization focused on global reforestation. It is an environmental charity, based in the US with international reach, and its mission is to make it simple for anyone to help the environment by planting trees. We registered with them online to receive an email copy of their free, concise one-page poster on Why Trees Matter for Air Quality, Clean Water, Biodiversity, Social Impact, Health, and Climate Regulation. More to come on this organization in our upcoming post on “Don’t have a yard? No problem.”

Why Trees?

Global warming and climate change are complicated and complex, as are their solutions. There is some good news from scientists – trees matter big time. Plus, helping to grow the tree canopy is something any citizen, organization, company and government can do right away, today. No need for new policy, new laws, or committees.

We find this hopeful and compelling. We hope our Readers will too. 

Swiss scientist Thomas Crowther makes a clear case for why trees matter. The ground-breaking study he co-authored and published in July 2019 in the journal of Science, mapped tree density at a global scale for the first time.

The findings caught the attention of scientists, media, governments and the public by storm by quantifying how many trees exist globally and offering research evidence for why efforts to scale up global tree planting are needed and what the gains might be, in terms of positive impacts for helping to slow global warming.

We realize that tree planting (reforestation) doesn’t replace the overarching need for other concurrent actions to reduce or avoid harmful carbon emissions in the first place. We are excited, nonetheless, by the promising potential that scaling up tree planting offers in terms of being a big part of the solution to slow global warming, and we are motivated to act.

Just how much trees matter, is captured in this CBC piece profiling the study’s findings — “The study calculated that over the decades, those new trees could suck up nearly 750 billion tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – about as much carbon pollution as humans have spewed in the past 25 years.”  (Click here for the article https://bit.ly/34lo2em.)

The organizers for Earth Day 2020 have set an ambitious goal – to plant 7.8 billion trees in 2020 – one tree for every person on Planet Earth. 

Just as we are learning how much trees matter, we believe that each one of us matters and makes a difference on climate change. That’s why we are learning how to blog, so we may keep on sharing with others as we continue to learn, connect, and do more together on this all important global challenge. Our goal is to post something every Thursday, so we hope you will visit our blog often!