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Forestation, including forest restoration, reforestation, and afforestation, is the process of restoring damaged forests or growing forests on currently unforested land. Forest restoration involves helping degraded forest land recover its forest structure, ecological processes, and biodiversity. Reforestation includes planting trees or allowing trees to regrow on land that had recently been covered with forest. Afforestation involves planting trees on land that has not recently been covered with forest. Because forests remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere as trees grow and can potentially store that carbon for long periods of time, forestation is often counted as a form of carbon removal. Forestation can provide many benefits, which depend on exactly how it is done. Forest restoration, for instance, provides far greater ecological and biodiversity benefits than a monoculture tree plantation does.
The maximum amount of CO2 that could be removed from the atmosphere through forestation depends on the amount of land devoted to afforestation and reforestation. The annual rate of carbon sequestration could reach up to 3.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) per year by midcentury and up to 7 GtCO2 by 2100, for a total cumulative sequestration of 80–260 GtCO2.
Because forests stop sequestering additional carbon once they reach a certain stage of maturity, which happens on a scale of decades to centuries, sequestering more carbon through forestation would eventually require finding more land for afforestation. Up to the point of saturation, however, older trees generally sequester more carbon per year than younger trees, meaning that avoiding deforestation is a more effective way to reduce climate change than adding new forests or restoring degraded forests.
The direct costs of forestation are likely to be in the range of $5–50 per ton of CO2 sequestered, with natural regeneration of forests sometimes occurring at no direct cost when recently deforested lands are left to recover on their own.
Forest restoration, reforestation, and afforestation are already widely practiced. This makes forestation one of the few approaches to carbon removal that is ready to be implemented at large scale immediately.
Last updated June 24, 2020
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