I was a bit discouraged to hear that the CO2 the plants remove is ultimately rereleased into the atmosphere when the plant decomposes. So I’m wondering what positive impacts I’m making with my backyard garden, if any.
Also, with millions of gardens, would they really be totally useless for CO2 removal? Or is there some small amount that gets captured by the plant and then *not* rereleased into the atmosphere, in other words, permanently removed from the air?
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As long as a plant is alive it holds onto some CO2 that would otherwise be in the atmosphere. This means that as long as you keep replacing the plants in your garden with new ones when the old ones die, your garden is keeping some little CO2 out of the atmosphere. Sure, the CO2 absorbed by your plants gets re-released whenever your plants die and are decomposed, but every new plant takes up CO2 again. So in that sense, the world does have a tiny bit less CO2 in its atmosphere thanks to your backyard.
Having said that, it depends of course on what you assume would be there instead of your garden. If you compare it to a tiled-over backyard, then yes, it’s a net benefit. But if you compare it to simply letting nature run its course, then likely the same patch of land would have been fully overgrown, and thus would have captured *more* CO2. So regarding your last question: millions of gardens *aren’t* having a net benefit in the sense that those patches of land would almost certainly have had plants growing on them anyway, and likely more than they do now. However, if the choice is between planting a garden and just putting down some tiles or gravel or whatnot, then the former is definitely the better choice, and not even so much from a CO2 perspective but more from the point of view of biodiversity, water management and (counteracting) urban heating.
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