Forests are one of the planet’s first lines of defense against climate change, absorbing as much as a quarter of man-made carbon emissions each year.
Published 10:40 AM EDT Oct 4, 2019Around the world, people put shovels to ground to help it happen.
Rebuilding woodland is slow and often difficult work, and it requires patience: It can take several decades or longer for forests to regrow as viable habitats. “Planting a tree is only one step in the process,” said Christopher Barton, a professor of forest hydrology at the Appalachian Center of the University of Kentucky.
A study in the journal Science projected that if 2.2 billion acres of trees were planted – about 500 billion saplings – they could absorb 220 gigatons of carbon once they reached maturity. The Swiss researchers estimated this would be equivalent to about two-thirds of man-made carbon emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution.Leo Correa, APOn a spring morning, forestry researcher Jhon Farfan steered a motorcycle through the dense Peruvian jungle, his tires churning up red mud.
After cutting and burning centuries-old trees, miners used diesel pumps to suck up deep layers of the earth, then pushed the soil through filters to separate out gold particles. To turn gold dust into nuggets, they stirred in mercury, which binds the gold together but poisons the land. A study of former gold mines in Peru by scientists at CINCIA and Wake Forest University several years ago found that seedlings transplanted with soil were more likely to survive than “bare-root seedlings,” and the use of special fertilizers helped growth. Some of the trees tested absorbed trace amounts of mercury through contaminated soil, but it’s not clear how this will affect them.
A bulldozer knocks down non-native trees in Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia on Aug. 26, 2019. After miners left West Virginia's Cheat Mountain in the 1980s, there was an effort to green the coal mining sites to comply with federal law.Companies planted “desperation species” – grasses with shallow roots or non-native trees that could endure but wouldn’t reach their full height.
“We literally go in with a giant plow-like machine and rip the guts out of the soil” by dragging a 4-foot ripping shank behind a bulldozer, said Barton, the University of Kentucky professor and founder of Green Forests Work. “Sometimes we call it ugly.”
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