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Tree planting is no climate solution at northern high latitudes

Nature Geoscience volume 17, pages 1087–1092 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Planting trees has become a popular solution for climate change mitigation, owing to the ability of trees to accumulate carbon in biomass and thereby reduce anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 enrichment. As conditions for tree growth expand with global warming, tree-planting projects have been introduced in regions of the highest northern latitudes. However, several lines of evidence suggest that high-latitude tree planting is counterproductive to climate change mitigation. In northern boreal and Arctic regions, tree planting results in net warming due to increased surface darkness (decreased albedo), which counteracts potential mitigation effects from carbon storage in areas where biomass is limited and of low resilience. Furthermore, tree planting disturbs pools of soil carbon, which store most of the carbon in cold ecosystems, and has negative effects on native Arctic biota and livelihoods. Despite the immediate economic prospects that northern tree planting may represent, this approach does not constitute a valid climate-warming-mitigation strategy in either the Arctic or most of the boreal forest region. This has been known for decades, but as policies that incentivize tree planting are increasingly adopted across the high-latitude region, we warn against a narrow focus on biomass carbon storage. Instead, we call for a systems-oriented consideration of climate solutions that are rooted in an understanding of the whole suite of relevant Earth system processes that affect the radiative balance. This is crucial to avoid the implementation of ineffective or even counterproductive climate-warming mitigation strategies in the Arctic and boreal regions.

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Fig. 1: The direct and indirect effects of afforestation on climate forcing at high latitudes and their relative magnitudes over the lifetime of a plantation.
Fig. 2: Examples of climate risks posed by northern tree planting.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was conceived during a workshop in Greenland funded by NERC Arctic Office UK-Greenland Arctic Bursary 2023/2024. J.Å.K. was supported by the Carlsberg Foundation (CARBONZOO, grant no. CF23_0641) and SustainScapes – Center for Sustainable Solutions under Global Change (Novo Nordisk Foundation grant no. NNF20OC0059595). The work of M.M.-F. and J.T.K. is supported by NERC project NE/W00089X/1. I.C.B. and E.L.-B. received funding from the Nordic Borealization Network (project funded by NordForsk (project no. 164079)). E.L.-B. considers this study a contribution to GreenFeedBack (greenhouse gas fluxes and Earth system feedbacks) funded by the European Union’s HORIZON Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement number 101056921. M.L.M. and L.B.-P. were supported by the A. V. Jensen Foundation. We warmly thank Kangerlussuaq International Science Support for hosting the workshop in March 2024.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Jeppe Å. Kristensen

  2. Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Jeppe Å. Kristensen & Yadvinder Malhi

  3. Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Jeppe Å. Kristensen & Yadvinder Malhi

  4. Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Nuuk, Greenland

    Laura Barbero-Palacios, Ida B. D. Jacobsen, Efrén López-Blanco, Mathilde Le Moullec & Katrine Raundrup

  5. Faculty of Environmental and Forest Sciences, Agricultural University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland

    Isabel C. Barrio

  6. Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Jeffrey T. Kerby & Marc Macias-Fauria

  7. Institute of Arctic Studies, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Jeffrey T. Kerby

  8. Department of Ecoscience, Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark

    Efrén López-Blanco

  9. Department of Ecology, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Carsten W. Mueller

  10. Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Eric Post

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Contributions

All authors contributed to the initial conceptualization. J.Å.K. wrote the first version of the manuscript with substantial inputs from M.M.-F., and L.B.-P., I.C.B., I.B.D.J., J.T.K., E.L.-B., Y.M., M.L.M., C.W.M., E.P. and K.R. provided important inputs on subsequent versions. L.B.-P. made the illustration for Fig. 1. M.L.M. and J.T.K. provided photographs for Fig. 2a,b. J.Å.K. led the manuscript revisions with inputs from M.M.-F. Input and approval of the revised manuscript before resubmission was given by L.B.-P., I.C.B., I.B.D.J., J.T.K., E.L.-B., Y.M., M.L.M., C.W.M., E.P. and K.R. The author list is presented in alphabetical order, except for the first and last authors.

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Correspondence to Jeppe Å. Kristensen or Marc Macias-Fauria.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Edouard Davin, Birgit Wild and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Xujia Jiang, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Extended data

Extended Data Table 1 Reference values for the tundra ecosystem in Fig. 1b
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Extended Data Table 2 Reference values for the plantation ecosystem in Fig. 1b
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Extended Data Table 3 The Net Climate Impact (carbon–albedo) of tree planting Fig. 1b
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Kristensen, J.Å., Barbero-Palacios, L., Barrio, I.C. et al. Tree planting is no climate solution at northern high latitudes. Nat. Geosci. 17, 1087–1092 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01573-4

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