"At the start of a major Climate Engineering Conference in Berlin, the Global Forest Coalition has launched a Working Paper that highlights the risks of different proposals for large-scale Carbon Dioxide Removal. The report finds that while the most prominent CDR approach, Bioenergy and Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) technology is still in a state of “infancy” and is unlikely to be rolled out on a global scale, biosequestration in the form of afforestation through monoculture tree plantations is already rapidly expanding and causing significant negative social and environmental impacts."

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"Some countries are now investing heavily in the future of geoengineering—large-scale technological solutions to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Baccini thinks we ought to be planting trees. “We are not there yet” with even the most promising geoengineering approaches. “For the next 50 years, it would be more effective to just do it using a more natural system,” he says. “The most effective way to do it fast, and in a cheap way, is doing it with a forest.”"

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Boysen, Lena R.; Lucht, Wolfgang; Gerten, Dieter (2017): Trade-offs for food production, nature conservation and climate limit the terrestrial carbon dioxide removal potential. In Glob Chang Biol. DOI: 10.1111/gcb.13745.

"We integrate these factors in one spatially explicit biogeochemical simulation framework to explore the tCDR opportunity space on land available after these constraints are taken into account, starting either in 2020 or 2050, and lasting until 2100. We find that assumed future needs for nature protection and food production strongly limit tCDR potentials. BPs on abandoned crop and pasture areas (~1300 Mha in scenarios of either 8.0 billion people and yield gap reductions of 25% until 2020 or 9.5 billion people and yield gap reductions of 50% until 2050) could, theoretically, sequester ~100 GtC in land carbon stocks and biomass harvest by 2100."

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Bright, Ryan M.; Davin, Edouard; O’Halloran, Thomas; Pongratz, Julia; Zhao, Kaiguang; Cescatti, Alessandro (2017): Local temperature response to land cover and management change driven by non-radiative processes. In Nature Climate change 7 (4), pp. 296–302. DOI: 10.1038/nclimate3250.

"Here, we combine extensive records of remote sensing and in situ observation to show that non-radiative mechanisms dominate the local response in most regions for eight of nine common LCMC perturbations. We find that forest cover gains lead to an annual cooling in all regions south of the upper conterminous United States, northern Europe, and Siberia—reinforcing the attractiveness of re-/afforestation as a local mitigation and adaptation measure in these regions."

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