The global tree restoration potential

By Jean‐François Bastin, Y. Finegold, Claude A. Garcia, D. Mollicone, Marcelo Rezende, D. Routh, Constantin M. Zohner, T. Crowther. Science, 2019

1,752 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The potential for global forest cover The restoration of forested land at a global scale could help capture atmospheric carbon and mitigate climate change. Bastin et al. used direct measurements of forest cover to generate a model of forest restoration potential across the globe (see the Perspective by Chazdon and Brancalion). Their spatially explicit maps show how much additional tree cover could exist outside of existing forests and agricultural and urban land. Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity.Such a change has the potential to store an equivalent of 25% of the current atmospheric carbon pool. Science, this issue p. 76; see also p. 24 There is room on the planet for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of tree cover, supporting 517 billion trees and storing 205 Gt of carbon. The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, we found that there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as one of the most effective carbon drawdown solutions to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dda1a4818c74498a61571e688233bc8cec4e15d4

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Forests and Decarbonization – Roles of Natural and Planted Forests (2020, background): “More conservative approaches suggest that large-scale afforestation and reforestation efforts could remove between 40 and 100 GtC from the atmosphere once forests reach maturity (Lewis et al., 2019a; Veldman et al., 2019) – an impressive quantity that nonetheless represents only a decade’s worth of ”
Climate-driven risks to the climate mitigation potential of forests (2020, background): “, (129), which inflated estimates of tree restoration’s realistically feasible, climate-cooling carbon storage potential by at least 3- to 10-fold (130–133)].”
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (2019, background): “ting trees, also called afforestation, can be a means of sequestering CO 2 over the long term. According to one estimate, up to 0.9 billion hectares of extra canopy cover could theoretically be added [428] globally. However, care must be taken when planting trees to ensure a positive impact. Affores”
Forest microclimates and climate change: Importance, drivers and future research agenda (2021, background): “Such arguments are to date hardly considered in the pros and cons of the global tree restoration debate (e.g., Bastin et al. 2019).”
Predicting into unknown space? Estimating the area of applicability of spatial prediction models (2020, methodology): “We used Random Forests (Breiman, 2001) as machine learning algorithm because it is one of the most frequently used algorithms in the context of environmental mapping (e.g. used in the context of global mapping in Bastin et al., 2019; Hengl et al., 2017; van den Hoogen et al., 2019).”
Enhancing climate change resilience of ecological restoration — A framework for action (2021, background): “However, this option is fraught with uncertainties because of cryptic maladaptation, underestimation of climate variability differences, and many unforeseen issues from introduced and/or invasive species (Benito-Garzón et al., 2013).”
Fostering natural forest regeneration on former agricultural land through economic and policy interventions (2020, background): “Bastin et al (2019) estimated that 9 million km2 of restored woodlands and forests globally could be ecologically suitable areas for reforestation (including natural regeneration).”
How feasible are global forest restoration commitments? (2020, background): “…restoration into the center of the global discussion on ways to combat climate change, prevent species extinctions, and improve rural livelihoods (Bastin et al., 2019; Griscom et al., 2017; IUCN, 2018; Suding et al., 2015; This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons…”
Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change (2019, positive): “A suite of possible actions could be effective in navigating these tradeoffs (19, 95)— for example, focusing on regeneration and restoration of high-carbon ecosystems (as well as reducing waste and overconsumption) rather than massive bioenergy monoculture plantations—to achieve climate change mitig”