Planting Trees vs. Saving Trees: What You Should Know
It seems as if almost every day a new corporation, influencer, or organization is making a massive commitment to plant more trees to fight climate change. Within the past month, World Economic Forum, Jane Goodall, Microsoft—just to name a few—have announced their plans to plant millions to trillions of trees.
The Conservation Fund too has supported tree planting efforts for many years as a critical element in restoring land, benefiting wildlife habitat, supporting clean air and water, and sequestering toxic emissions from our atmosphere. And while there’s no doubt that planting new trees will play an important role in capturing carbon dioxide from the air and helping to fight climate change in the future, there are, however, other things to consider.
These newly planted trees will take years and even decades to grow to their full carbon absorbing potential, and we cannot ignore the immediate threat from the deforestation of our already-existing, mature, working forestlands as we face the colossal challenge of climate change. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, our domestic forests sequester up to 15% of the greenhouse gas emissions generated in this country each year, but over 37 million acres of U.S. forests still face a severe threat of devastation.
Luckily, organizations, businesses and change-makers are finding creative capital market solutions to solve this growing challenge. Learn more about the working forest protection initiative from our CEO and president, Larry Selzer.
New York Daily News — Seeing the forest and the trees: To fight climate change, we must protect existing woodlands
New York Times: Letter to the Editor (third story) — How to Protect Our Precious Forests
