The Global Forest Watch published a new paper in Nature Climate Change last month that presented a current forest carbon flux map. The paper looked at just how much carbon dioxide we can sink into the current levels of forestation around the world. First, they measured the biomass of the forests with NASA’s ICESat data. Yes, there’s a backronym in there. ICESat stands for Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite. Bring on the BABIES award.

From that data, the researchers could calculate how much carbon dioxide could be absorbed by the trees, and then they balanced that out with the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from deforestation, fires, etc. Per the press release: According to the researchers, forests collectively absorbed around 15.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere each year between 2001 and 2019, while deforestation, fires, and other disturbances released an average of 8.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Forests around the world are estimated to absorb about 7.6 billion metric tons, acting as a net carbon sink of roughly 1.5 times the annual emissions from the entire United States.

Not bad, but not great, since the United States is only one country amongst many. It’s a starting point, though, for us to really comprehend just how much we need to cut carbon dioxide emissions and how many trees we need to keep around.

And about those trees, like the oaks, we mentioned earlier. We do have to look at them individually as well, and for all we Californians get annoyed at lawns that use too much water, it turns out that the English did something right when it came to trees planted along streets. With nearly 85% of the world’s population living in urban areas, we see more trees in cities than in forests. And the lockdown made this even more apparent as people couldn’t get out to visit forests.

There’s even an app for that called Tree Talk, which saw users increase over 50% as people started looking for local trees to visit. And of course, these trees provide lots of benefits beyond our own personal connection with nature and being great carbon sinks. They support wildlife, they protect against urban flooding, they reduce temperatures, and they even help lower the prevalence of asthma.

So next time your local town starts talking about cutting down that big tree, make sure they have a really good reason. We still need to see the trees, too, and not just the forests.

More Information

NASA press release

“Global maps of twenty-first century forest carbon fluxes,” Nancy L. Harris et al., 2021 January 21, Nature Climate Change

The Conversation article