Planting trees will not necessarily slow climate change.
Kim Naudts at the Laboratory of Climate Science and Environment in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and her colleagues paired a history of land-use in Europe with land and atmospheric models to study the effect of forests on the climate. Although the continent's forests have expanded by 10%, timber harvesting and a shift to more commercially valuable trees — mainly the fast-growing conifers — have resulted in the release of more than 3 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere since 1750.
The change from deciduous trees to darker-leaved conifers contributed to a rise of 0.12 ° C in local surface temperatures.
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More carbon from planted forests. Nature 530, 132 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/530132c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/530132c
