Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumOops. Chile Discovers That Vast Monoculture Tree Plantings Increased Carbon Storage By Less Than 2%
A multidecade state program to subsidize tree planting in one of South America's wealthiest nations led to a loss of biodiversity and did little to increase the forests' capacity to capture greenhouse gases. Chile's plantation forests more than doubled between 1986 and 2011, while native forests shrunk by 13%, according to a new report by U.S. and Chilean academics. The country subsidized tree planting while its forestry sector boomed over that period.
Yet the environmental benefits are not as clear. Subsidies accelerated biodiversity losses in Chile as plantations often focus on one or two profitable tree species, the report said. While forest area expanded by more than 100% between 1986 and 2011, the carbon stored in vegetation increased by just 1.98% during that period.
"Our simulations indicate that plantation subsidies accelerated biodiversity losses in Chile by encouraging the expansion of plantations into more biodiverse forests," researchers said in the paper published in Nature Sustainability yesterday. Chile's case "provides several cautionary lessons," according to Robert Heilmayr at the University of California Santa Barbara, Cristian Echeverria at Universidad de Concepcion in Chile and Eric F. Lambin at Stanford University.
Planting trees can increase biodiversity and fight soil erosion. Forests have the capacity to absorb carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, becoming so-called "carbon sinks" that contribute to mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming. But Chile's case shows that planting trees at a large scale is expensive and might not contribute much to the fight against climate change.
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https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2020/06/23/stories/1063435653
padah513
(2,483 posts)I just read on the Science Daily website that they planted commercially valuable trees in plantations rather than biologically valuable natural forests.
NickB79
(19,111 posts)Any more than a suburban lawn makes a prairie.
Nature abhors a monoculture.