In praise of forest plantations

AMONG all the landscapes created by human industry, timber plantations may be one of the most maligned.

Spreading across the land in rows as symmetrical as Minecraft blocks, and replacing natural biodiversity with a single-species monoculture, they’re often seen as eyesores. I’d guess many people would rate them as only marginally more attractive than, say, abandoned factories, or cookie-cutter suburban sprawl.

That’s a shame. Aside from being essential sources of raw materials since the dawn of humanity, forests play a vital role in reining in the damage that we’ve done to our environment over the past few hundred years. Stretching across an area of the planet about the size of Asia, they can reduce the burden of carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere by sucking it up and turning it into wood. Plantations make up about 8% of the world’s forests, sufficient to cover India.

We shouldn’t ignore their contribution.

That’s particularly the case because in much of the world, managed forests may be the most effective way of doing this.

On 54% of the area worldwide that might be suitable for reforestation over the coming decades, plantation forests will sequester carbon more cheaply than those allowed to regrow naturally, according to a recent study in Nature Climate Change.

Across Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia, stands of eucalyptus and acacia could fix carbon at prices lower than natural reforestation, according to the study’s authors. It’s a similar picture in Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines. Teak in Cambodia and Ethiopia, and poplars in northern China, Turkey and the Maghreb could perform the same function.

Such practices have come under justified fire in recent years after multiple academic studies and media reports showing bogus accounting in the market for voluntary “forest offsets.”

That criticism is justified. Too much of the world’s voluntary forest carbon market was based on questionable assumptions — such as claiming that trees were on the brink of being logged and then charging an “avoided deforestation” fee to preserve them from the chainsaw, even in the absence of solid evidence they were at any risk.

The practice allowed pollutants to get off the hook, buying cheap and bogus credits to make their environmental performance look good, rather than doing the hard and costly work of actually reducing emissions.

That’s just another advantage of plantations, however. Plenty of people made good money selling imaginary carbon credits for “avoided deforestation.” This doesn’t work if you’re a forest manager, because trees are made out of carbon: If your forest isn’t fixing any CO2 from the atmosphere, it’s not growing and producing timber you can sell for money.

In a plantation, the interests of the people cultivating the forest are aligned with the needs of the climate. You can only justify the costs of growing and managing your timber if you’re promised a revenue payoff at the end. With “avoided deforestation,” you’re often just finding the cheapest way to allow consumers in rich countries to pin green “carbon offset” logos on their long-haul flight tickets.

There is still plenty of room for growth in this sector. The Nature Climate Change study found more than five million sq km (two million sq m) of deforested land where plantation would be feasible in environmental and economic terms, far more than the roughly three million sq km currently taken up by planted forests.

In truth, the world is unlikely to need even that much because, in contrast to our consumption of industrial products (which has seemed close to insatiable in recent decades) demand for forest goods is growing at a more tree-like pace.

People trying to cram another delivery box into their recycling bin might be surprised to discover that such uses of wood pulp are still a distinctly minority practice.

Until 2016, the majority of the world’s wood was still turned into fuel — humanity’s oldest technological innovation, and one that still provides energy for hundreds of millions of hearths across India and sub-Saharan Africa.

Switching those cooking stoves to gas — or better still, renewable electricity — would result in dramatic improvements in public health, as households in developing countries no longer have to breathe in the noxious particulates from wood smoke. It would also open up plantation land for higher-value wood that could be turned into paper, pulp, and timber.

If we want fewer of our buildings to be made out of heavily polluting cement, we’re going to need to ensure we’ve got the lumber on hand for natural alternatives.

That’s reason to welcome, rather than condemn the world’s plantations. They may not be as serene as a natural forest, but they’re still one of our best tools for fighting climate change. — Bloomberg