In the Arctic, planting more trees actually makes the world warmer
Marc Macias-Fauria receives funding from Natural Environment Research Council (NERC, UK), National Science Foundation (NSF, USA), and the European Commission..
Across much of the world, planting more trees means more carbon is stored, and global warming is reduced. That’s the thinking behind recent proposals to plant more trees in Alaska, Greenland and Iceland.
But we recently published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience in which we argue that tree planting is no climate solution at northern high latitudes. In fact, it does more harm than good.
If we are to address climate change, it is of course imperative to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, other components of the Earth system also play important roles in determining if any given intervention will cause the planet to warm more or less.
One such component is known as “albedo”. It refers to how much solar radiation is reflected by the surface of our planet back into space. In the northern high latitudes, snow covers the ground during many months every year. Snow is white, which makes it reflect about three quarters of the solar energy hitting it when covering the tundra: it therefore has high albedo.
