<story><title>Is it better to plant trees or let forests regrow naturally?</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/is-it-better-to-plant-trees-or-let-forests-regrow-naturally</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chris_va</author><text>(disclaimer, I am part of a Climate&amp;amp;Energy R&amp;amp;D lab)&lt;p&gt;The goal is not really to produce a set of big trees, but to maximize the amount of carbon you can suck out of the atmosphere per year, heavily weighted to the near future. As a result, producing an old growth forest is not the correct metric (if you are optimizing purely for climate).&lt;p&gt;A stable forest (from purely a climate perspective) is also not the right optimization. Ideally, you&amp;#x27;d lock away the carbon outside of the biosphere, instead of letting it get recycled.</text></item><item><author>JoeAltmaier</author><text>A healthy old-growth forest is maybe 100 trees per acre.&lt;p&gt;A &amp;#x27;naturally regrowing&amp;#x27; forest may be 400 trees per acre. They&amp;#x27;re scrub trees, none of the ever getting very large, unhealthy and scraggly and broken by every storm.&lt;p&gt;It takes maybe a century of trees dying, giving one of their cohort a chance to get ahead of the others, then shading them and &amp;#x27;thinning the herd&amp;#x27; until you have a stable population. Then, they&amp;#x27;re still not very healthy because they &amp;#x27;grew from scrub&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;They have to then die of natural causes one at a time and be replaced by a single healthy one. Maybe another 50 years. Finally you have a stable healthy forest.&lt;p&gt;Or, you can just plant 100 trees per acre in a grid. And mow the volunteers until you have what you want. 20 years maybe.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stinos</author><text>Doesn&amp;#x27;t hurt explicitly mentioning the biodiversity crisis is, just like the climate one, also a pressing issue. And when it comes to solutions revolving around forests (or a collection of trees if you wish), it&amp;#x27;s the area where both clash: optimizing for one will be less ideal for the other. Personally I feel like in such cases it would be wise to strive for a solution which is sliglty in favor of biodiversity, just because for the climate there are a number of other solutions which have a larger potential effect.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is it better to plant trees or let forests regrow naturally?</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/is-it-better-to-plant-trees-or-let-forests-regrow-naturally</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chris_va</author><text>(disclaimer, I am part of a Climate&amp;amp;Energy R&amp;amp;D lab)&lt;p&gt;The goal is not really to produce a set of big trees, but to maximize the amount of carbon you can suck out of the atmosphere per year, heavily weighted to the near future. As a result, producing an old growth forest is not the correct metric (if you are optimizing purely for climate).&lt;p&gt;A stable forest (from purely a climate perspective) is also not the right optimization. Ideally, you&amp;#x27;d lock away the carbon outside of the biosphere, instead of letting it get recycled.</text></item><item><author>JoeAltmaier</author><text>A healthy old-growth forest is maybe 100 trees per acre.&lt;p&gt;A &amp;#x27;naturally regrowing&amp;#x27; forest may be 400 trees per acre. They&amp;#x27;re scrub trees, none of the ever getting very large, unhealthy and scraggly and broken by every storm.&lt;p&gt;It takes maybe a century of trees dying, giving one of their cohort a chance to get ahead of the others, then shading them and &amp;#x27;thinning the herd&amp;#x27; until you have a stable population. Then, they&amp;#x27;re still not very healthy because they &amp;#x27;grew from scrub&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;They have to then die of natural causes one at a time and be replaced by a single healthy one. Maybe another 50 years. Finally you have a stable healthy forest.&lt;p&gt;Or, you can just plant 100 trees per acre in a grid. And mow the volunteers until you have what you want. 20 years maybe.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Joakal</author><text>Have you considered something different for climate; mass production of climate change resistant (ie heat&amp;#x2F;acid) photosynthetic plankton and releasing to ocean?&lt;p&gt;How does it compare to trees?</text></comment>