Yahoo – One strategy that is being implemented to combat the ongoing overheating of our planet may actually be doing more harm than good, scientists have warned. A new study on commercial tree-planting schemes discovered a variety of unintended consequences.
The problem is that many of these initiatives simply try to plant as many trees as they can for as little money as possible, creating plantations of a single type of tree — often pine, eucalyptus, or teak — which results in commercial monocultures instead of native forests.
According to the study, we need to put more emphasis on preserving and protecting ecosystems as a whole rather than on viewing trees as “nothing more than sticks of carbon.”