It was supposed to be a good-news story out of the damaged Amazon rainforest: a project that replanted hundreds of thousands of trees in an illegally deforested nature reserve in Brazil.
The trees would die and rot at some point, which releases the CO2 they stored. We cannot keep capturing CO2 without increasing forest areas, and that’s expensive. However, artificial carbon capture does not fare much better so the best strategy is to just burn less stuff. It is still more effective to offset fossil fuel power plants with clean electricity (as long as there is no oversupply) than using it for carbon capture.
Trees replace themselves. So yes, forests store carbon, rather than specific trees. Also, dead trees don’t just evaporate into the atmosphere. Other species eat them, etc. Over time more and more carbon will be stored somewhere, if it’s left alone.
The trees would die and rot at some point, which releases the CO2 they stored. We cannot keep capturing CO2 without increasing forest areas, and that’s expensive. However, artificial carbon capture does not fare much better so the best strategy is to just burn less stuff. It is still more effective to offset fossil fuel power plants with clean electricity (as long as there is no oversupply) than using it for carbon capture.
Trees replace themselves. So yes, forests store carbon, rather than specific trees. Also, dead trees don’t just evaporate into the atmosphere. Other species eat them, etc. Over time more and more carbon will be stored somewhere, if it’s left alone.