Is Planting More Trees a Way of Solving Global Warming?
• Increasing the world’s forest cover is uniformly considered to be a useful mechanism for mitigating atmospheric CO2 concentrations, because of the ability for plants to remove CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. • However, even a vigorous global reforestation program would not be sufficient to offset anthropogenic CO2 emissions from human sources. • Thus, reforestation may assist in reducing the rate at which atmospheric CO2 increases (and provide additional ecological benefits as well), but the stabilization of CO2 will still require direct reductions in CO2 emissions.
