Politico: The risky climate bet of using forests to remove CO2
“Growing worries about the speed and scale of climate change are prompting a look at technologies ranging from nuclear to sci-fi schemes like space mirrors. But there’s one system that’s been doing a pretty good job of pulling carbon from the atmosphere for the last 360 million years: trees. That’s made forests a favored low-tech way of combating global warming — including by the European Union, which calls for planting 3 billion trees by 2030 as part of its effort to cut CO2 emissions by 55 percent by that year. But it’s a risky gamble as those trees are in danger from some of the consequences of climate change, including increasing wildfires, droughts and pests. And trees that burn or die end up releasing their captured CO2 back into the atmosphere.”