I'm not a climate expert but it seems to me that planting trees is a great solution to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which we should concentrate vast amounts of effort on right after we figure out how to stop releasing decades worth of fossilised carbon every year. Until that point it's just pissing into the wind.
Trees are part of the solution. If we were to reforest the world you begin to encounter other issues like land for farming(although agroforestry helps with this), land for solar farms/nuclear, etc. It is annoyingly complex. I would argue rewilding the land is more important for restoring biodiversity and reconnecting humans with nature. The carbon sequestration it provides is just an added touch.
This short little web game: https://www.roadto10gigatons.com/ illustrates the benefits and tradeoffs of carbon removal solutions (from trees to direct air capture tech).
I think we need to try everything to see what’s most cost-effective: every possible solution has to deal with the enormous scale of the problem — ~36 gigatons of CO2 emitted each year, and we need an effective 99.9% reduction in CO2 emissions sustained for the next millennium.
That last 9.9%[0] is going to be incredibly hard if it was an actual reduction rather than some other solution, so carbon capture is probably important.
But that means that even if planting trees is only 360 megatons/year — 1% of the ultimate problem — it can still be a big part of the solution.
Might get replaced (economically speaking) with something more direct, like Sabatier-process fuels, but for now it’s worth trying. (But all that said, trying must always have the possibility of the answer being “no”).
[0] Guestimate on the basis that last-percent is generally more difficult than first-percent, and how much comes from each sector.
This is true, but you can do it as a long term solution.
Just change a non-forest area into a forest area and keep it this way long term. Trees will die in this area but will be replaced by new trees automatically. So you have an amount of CO² bound to this forest long term.
