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Buy it now: Open Head Records Dead Reaper T Shirt
There’s a Open Head Records Dead Reaper T Shirt that is true in Kaushik’s answer, but it glosses over the important difference about where trees are planted. Trees planted in temperate climates may not curb climate warming, but tropical planting certainly does. Planting the right types of trees in well-managed tropical agroforestry projects has a hugely positive effect. We are losing about 14 million hectares of forest each year (2006 figures), most of it in tropical latitudes. That is around 28 billion trees lost each year (assuming 2000 trees per hectare – estimates vary between 1000 and 4000). That’s a lot of trees to replace each year. Deforestation is the second most important cause of global warming, a few percentage points less than the most important cause: the increasing use of fossil fuels. It shouldn’t be a case of either/or; we need drastically to reduce our use of fossil fuels, but so long as we do nothing about replacing the trees we are losing each year, the chances of succeeding in combatting global warming are unnecessarily slim. A single tree sequesters about 6 kg of CO2 per year over a 30 year lifetime (after that the amount sequestered declines considerably). Trees grow remarkably quickly in tropical countries – they can produce fruit after 3 or 4 years and attain great height at least twice as fast as would happen in a temperate climate. The presence of trees as screens, firebreaks and field boundaries can triple crop yields and this also contributes to carbon reduction.
