Am not sure that headline is particularly useful. While it's quite true that trees have to be planted in the right place, and protecting old growth forest is the number one priority, I have yet to see a pathway to net zero that doesn't include a significant amount of tree planting and in a place like the UK we have pitifully low tree coverage. Plus, though most need to be broad leaf woodlands that benefit nature, we will also need more conifer plantations as wood is likely be needed more in construction.
And this is also why we need to eat less meat, because there isn't the land available for more trees, more space given over for nature, plantations, solar farms and the current scale of animal agriculture which is hugely inefficient use of land.
Perennial grassland sequesters a hell of a lot of carbon, that's probably why - tree plantations have to be a) successfully planted (lots planted on uplands have failed because essentially the microclimate is unsuitable etc see: brewdog's shitty attempt at offsetting) b) are not often particularly biodiverse (softwood grows fast, excludes a lot of light and has quite a barren forest floor). There is then the issue of what happens to the wood. The carbon is "locked up" in the trees whilst they grow but will need to be sequestered if it is not to be released again when they die (this making the plantation carbon neutral), so ideally the trees should be buried somehow. If they rot in the open air or are turned into timber, burnt etc then all that carbon just goes back.
I posted quite a lot of research about this on the doomed "meat" thread.
About a third of the actual carbon sequestration is done by fungi. Native grass types, certainly in the plains regions of the world have massive root structures to host fungi and are also therefore quite drought resilient. Perennial grasses do very well in our climate and if you look after them correctly can support very biodiverse microfauna and sequester lots of carbon, but the roots need to be looked after. This means liming it when the soil becomes acid (there's a NZ paper shows nicely that stopping grassland becoming acidic helps sequestration) and grazing it differently (mob grazing - see pic).
One of the problems is that thee has been a lot of very simplistic messaging round what is a very complex subject "plant lots of trees" is one, especially that corporates have jumped on to get themselves involved with some greenwashing whilst continuing to burn vast amounts of fossil fuels. I'm not against planting trees, but they should be the right trees in the right places (preferably broadleaved natives, well spaced), but, of course they take ages to establish and are not suitable in some cases. A good example is this: A lot of the species we wish to conserve in the UK exist because of agriculture, ie forest clearances and farming, pre and during the agrarian and industrial revolutions (eg there were very few hedges to speak of until the enclosure acts 1730-1839, so most hedges are well under 300 years old, this is also why you see so few of them in countries that went about the agrarian revolution differently, eg France). One of the species we wish to protect are lapwings. Lapwings are ground nesting birds that nest on stubble/grassland. As soon as you start planting trees near them then corvids can nest, who then prey on the chicks (even you town types may have seen crows raiding pigeons nests for the chicks). so; planting trees not great for them.
We also need to eat. Populations keep expanding and we need to produce more and more food. This is where the simplistic "just eat less meat" argument falls down, which again, is incredibly complex, and has been jumped on by venture capitalists to promote "greener" upfs that can be cheaply manufactured and have a much better margin than "actual" food. Some of the research around this has also been highly disingenuous, ie suggesting a lot of plant matter fed to animals could instead be fed to humans, which is not always true if you consider the actual plant. If you look at maize, for example, we can eat the seeds only. Cattle can (and do) eat the entire plant, so actually biomass of food grown often yields a significantly smaller biomass of nutrition suitable for humans. Even wheat itself is not wanted for milling unless it is of sufficient quality and that is going to depend on a lot of things, including the weather. So if you are, say, a farmer who has grown a lot of a milling variety f wheat that doesn't make the grade, where then does it go? If you are a company making oat milk, or brewing beer, what happens to all the spent grains - these things have taken time and energy to produce and can easily be turned into meat (in fact, they often are) by being fed to animals.
The "just eat less meat" messaging is also particularly damaging because people then think that eating all plants is better for the environment. This is just not the case. Look at the vast areas of Kenya that re now producing green beans to be airfrieghted to the UK so we can eat them out of season and not producing food for native Kenyans. Look at Almeria, where a lot of our tomatoes, peppers etc come from, its pretty much covered in plastic in the form of polytunnels, which then degrade and pollute the environment. Go to a potato growing region of the UK during spud harvest and check out how much soil is being lost (you'll see it running down the road when it rains). "Rewilding" here may, in effect mean that we force more and more of our food production on the developing world and with it, the environmental consequences. The climate here is quite resilient/high rainfall, and desertification is much less likely. There's a strong argument that we should "rewild" the parts of the developing world where erosion is worse and desertification is more likely and farm places like the UK and NZ as hard as we can, given that, especially in the UK, there has been over a thousand years of humans ploughing it up to do just that.
If we are to use less petrochemical derived fertiliser (as we must) then livestock have to be the answer to that, too.
I'm not advocating that everything stays the same and I'm also not advocating for intensive pig and poultry production in its present form, farming does need to change, but this may well involve more ruminants, not less. Change needs to happen slowly because otherwise you end up with situations like that in Sri Lanka. It is very easy for people to starve if yields collapse and I think our modern, fossil fuel fertiliser based system has made it easy for us in the west to forget that.
The only reason we have man made climate change is that since the industrial revolution we have been taking large quantities of carbon sequestered millions of years ago in the form of fossil fuels and started putting it back into the atmosphere by burning it. This needs to stop and we need not to be diverted by bullshit like British Airways planting a fuckton of trees to offset the emissions from jet fuel. We need tot to be using jets unless strictly necessary.
It is my personal belief that slowing climate change is not compatible with capitalism (alt least in its current globalist, neoliberal form), so fuck knows what we are gonna do about that.
Image: Grazing types and grass root structure differences
