*Younger forests pull the most out over a given period of time. The bulk of the carbon stays locked up as long as the wood doesn't decay/isn't burned. It's one reason some architects are starting to look at structural wood for larger buildings again, as long as the building stands you keep the carbon locked up in the framing. If we had a magic wand we could create a few super-fast growing species and plant massive amounts of forest of complimentary species that provide the soil with nearly everything needed to grow one another and simply harvest the lumber, drag it out to anoxic depths at sea and sink it not unlike the commonly accepted theory of the azolla event doing similar with aquatic ferns in our planet's past.
The best trees can manage about 48lbs of CO2 per year, that's 46 trees per metric tonne and healthy forest is 40-60 trees per acre. Just to go carbon neutral last year that would mean you would have needed at LEAST 53 million square miles of optimal forest. For reference, there are 196.9 million square miles of land on earth, effectively 1/4 of the land mass on earth would need to be 100% optimized decade or two old forest.
Roughly 31% of the earth is forest, however it's far from the above optimal conditions. In reality we'd need probably 50% (if not more) of the earth to be forest to manage what we did last year.
Coincidentally, pre-industrial era the earth was about 48% forest and current estimates are we lose something like 28,125 square miles annually to human operations. We're producing more and more while reducing the planet's ability to sequester.
Sadly planting more trees isn't even going to equate to a bandaid, it's going to be like loosing a limb to a wood chipper and gently blowing on the wound. It's purely a "this makes me feel good" thing.
*Younger forests pull the most out over a given period of time. The bulk of the carbon stays locked up as long as the wood doesn't decay/isn't burned. It's one reason some architects are starting to look at structural wood for larger buildings again, as long as the building stands you keep the carbon locked up in the framing. If we had a magic wand we could create a few super-fast growing species and plant massive amounts of forest of complimentary species that provide the soil with nearly everything needed to grow one another and simply harvest the lumber, drag it out to anoxic depths at sea and sink it not unlike the commonly accepted theory of the azolla event doing similar with aquatic ferns in our planet's past.
The best trees can manage about 48lbs of CO2 per year, that's 46 trees per metric tonne and healthy forest is 40-60 trees per acre. Just to go carbon neutral last year that would mean you would have needed at LEAST 53 million square miles of optimal forest. For reference, there are 196.9 million square miles of land on earth, effectively 1/4 of the land mass on earth would need to be 100% optimized decade or two old forest.
Roughly 31% of the earth is forest, however it's far from the above optimal conditions. In reality we'd need probably 50% (if not more) of the earth to be forest to manage what we did last year.
Coincidentally, pre-industrial era the earth was about 48% forest and current estimates are we lose something like 28,125 square miles annually to human operations. We're producing more and more while reducing the planet's ability to sequester.
Sadly planting more trees isn't even going to equate to a bandaid, it's going to be like loosing a limb to a wood chipper and gently blowing on the wound. It's purely a "this makes me feel good" thing.