As efforts to restore tree cover accelerate to help avoid runaway climate change, a study by Clark University researchers highlights how restoring tree cover can, in some locations, heat up the Earth rather than cool it by affecting how much sunlight the surface reflects (called “the albedo”).
As efforts to restore tree cover accelerate to help avoid runaway climate change, a study by Clark University researchers highlights how restoring tree cover can, in some locations, heat up the Earth rather than cool it by affecting how much sunlight the surface reflects (called “the albedo”).
The study by lead author Natalia Hasler, a research scientist at the George Perkins Marsh Institute, and co-author Christopher Williams, associate professor in the Graduate School of Geography, was published recently in the journal Nature Communications.
It provides a global analysis of where restoration of tree cover is most effective at cooling the global climate system, considering not just the cooling from carbon storage but also the warming from decreased albedo.
Working with their peers from The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and ETH-Zurich, Hasler and Williams provide a tool that practitioners and land managers can use to determine just how much of a problem albedo is for any reforestation or afforestation project on the globe. The authors use these new maps to show that previously published “carbon-only” estimates of the global climate mitigation potential of restoring trees worldwide provided significant overestimation, being anywhere from 20 to 81 percent too high.
Read more at Clark University
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