page_title: Carbon sequestration
section_title: Forestry
hierarchical_section_title: Carbon sequestration / Biological processes / Forestry
caption_attribution_description: English: Wood construction carbon sequestration at an international airport terminal. Almost all normally found in walls has been replaced by engineered wood beams.
context_page_description: Carbon sequestration or carbon dioxide removal is the long-term removal, capture or sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to slow or reverse atmospheric CO2 pollution and to mitigate or reverse global warming.
  Carbon dioxide is naturally captured from the atmosphere through biological, chemical, and physical processes. These changes can be accelerated through changes in land use and agricultural practices, such as converting crop and livestock grazing land into land for non-crop fast growing plants. Artificial processes have been devised to produce similar effects, including large-scale, artificial capture and sequestration of industrially produced CO
  ₂ using subsurface saline aquifers, reservoirs, ocean water, aging oil fields, or other carbon sinks, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage, biochar, ocean fertilization, enhanced weathering, and direct air capture when combined with storage.
  The likely need for CDR has been publicly expressed by a range of individuals and organizations involved with climate change issues, including IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri, the UNFCCC executive secretary Christiana Figueres, and the World Watch Institute.
context_section_description: Afforestation is the establishment of a forest in an area where there was no previous tree cover. Reforestation is the replanting of trees on marginal crop and pasture lands to incorporate carbon from atmospheric CO
  ₂ into biomass. 
  For this carbon sequestration process to succeed the carbon must not return to the atmosphere from mass burning or rotting when the trees die. To this end, land allotted to the trees must not be converted to other uses and management of the frequency of disturbances might be necessary in order to avoid extreme events. Alternatively, the wood from them must itself be sequestered, e.g., via biochar, bio-energy with carbon storage (BECS), landfill or 'stored' by use in e.g., construction. Short of growth in perpetuity, however, reforestation with long-lived trees (>100 years) will sequester carbon for substantial period and be released gradually, minimizing carbon's climate impact during the 21st century. Earth offers enough room to plant an additional 1.2 trillion trees. Planting and protecting them would offset some 10 years of CO₂ emissions and sequester 205 billion tons of carbon. This approach is supported by the Trillion Tree Campaign. Restoring all degraded forests world would capture about 205 billion tons of carbon in total (which is about 2/3rd of all carbon emissions. Still, mangroves are one of the best way to store carbon. Mangrove ecosystems are long-term carbon sinks that remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their biomass for thousands of years.
  In a paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability, researchers studied the net effect of continuing to build according to current practices versus increasing the amount of wood products. They concluded that if during the next 30 years new construction utilized 90% wood products that 700 million tons of carbon would be sequestered.
caption: Mactan Cebu International Terminal opened in 2018 utilized massive engineered wood beams instead of typical steel construction.