22 WESTERN PALLET
Spotted lantern fly, originally from China, has invaded the US East Coast, and is expected to make its way to California. Credit: Stephen Asmus / USDA-ARS
Report from Atlas Pallets after Caliente Fire
Lost trees hugely overrated as environmental threat, study finds
Cutting down trees inevitably leads to more carbon in the environment, but deforestation’s contributions to climate change have been vastly overestimated, according to a new study.
Researchers from Ohio State University and Yale University found that deforestation for timber and farmland is responsible for about 92 billion tons of carbon emissions into the environment since 1900. That number is only 20% of the previous estimate.
“Our estimate is about a fifth of what was found in previous work showing that deforestation has contributed 484 billion tons of carbon – a third of all manmade emissions – since 1900,” said Brent Sohngen, a professor of environmental and resource economics at Ohio State.
He said that the widely accepted estimate didn’t take into account the planting of new trees and other forest management techniques that lessen the environmental burden. The model used in this study did take those factors into account, which made a significant difference considering the intensive forest management happening in many parts of the world and the less-intensive, but not inconsequential, management that is happening elsewhere.
“There was a significant shift toward treating forests as a renewable, rather
Brent Sohngen
than nonrenewable, resource in the last century, and we estimate that those reforestation and forest management efforts have led to a far smaller carbon burden on the environment,” Sohngen said, adding that the previous estimate was based on trees’ natural regrowth without any human intervention.
“Man made land use and land use change have had a relatively small effect on carbon emissions compared to the almost 1,300 billion tons of industrial carbon emissions during the same time period.”
Previous estimates argued that about 27 percent of man made net carbon emissions were from deforestation whereas the new research estimates that the correct number is just 7 percent.
“Forestry and land use are blamed for being an enormous source of climate change, but they’re not an enormous source. The energy sector is an enormous source, and that’s where we should focus our attention – that and looking for ways to maximize our forests’ role in protecting the environment,” Sohngen said.