– If trees release the carbon again that they have absorbed throughout their life, when they die, why do we even plant trees then?
In: Biology
the trees don’t automatically release all carbon at once. Lots of it is in the wood of the trees.
Wooden logs keep carbon contained after the tree is dead until the wood is burned or rots away.
There are ways to sequester carbon more permanently than trees that only last for a few decades. Peat can keep much more carbon per area contained and does so for millennia. A bog may not loo as nice as a forest, but since stuff that falls in the bog doesn’t decay it is a much more effective carbon capture tool.
Trees work also the trick is that you constantly have the replace dead trees with new ones to keep things up. (Since trees live for decades or centuries in some cases and this process happens naturally if you set things up right this is not as big an issue as it may seem.)
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