Planting Trees Does Not Always Combat Climate Change

 Trees are rightly considered our heroes for a bunch of reasons

Map shows where it's fine to plant trees to combat
climate change and where it's a bad idea to do so.
Blue areas are good places to install trees, orange
areas are bad. Click on the map to make it
bigger and easier to see. 

At least a couple of those reasons involve climate change. They pull carbon dioxide from the air and burp out healthy doses of oxygen.  Plant a bunch of trees in a hot city, and that city will turn a little bit cooler. 

Just like anything else that's a good thing, trees don't work everywhere when it comes to climate change. As Yale Environment 360 tells us, it's actually a bad idea to plant trees everywhere. 

One of those places is in or near the Arctic.  At first glance, that's fine, since nobody is interested in going to middle of nowhere northern Canada and Siberia to plant trees.  The problem up there is, since it's getting warmer in the Arctic. There's a bunch of tundra up north that was always too cold to support trees.

Now, trees are creeping north because they are now finding it warm enough to sprout. Tundra is more often than  not white with snow and ice. That reflects the sun's heat back to space. Trees are darker, so they absorb heat from the sun. 

The result is the trees just help speed up Arctic warming.   

This will seem a bit odd at first glance, but the same problem trees cause in the Arctic do the same in hot desert areas.  In these areas, people are sometimes tempted to plant trees to improve the environment. Perhaps some people innocent think the trees will do their part to combat climate change. 

They don't. Trees in formerly desert areas are darker than expanses of sand and dust.  Just like in the Arctic, the dark trees attract the sum's warmth, making hot conditions worse. 

Thankfully, trees are allies in the fight against climate change in vast areas of the globe. Those include the entire eastern United States, the Pacific Northwest, the Amazon, a huge stretch of central Africa, most of Europe, Southeast Asia and a few other places.

Luckily these areas are precisely where people have chosen for tree planting projects. 

This news is based on a  study by Nature Communications. They include a handy-dandy map, which you can see in this post. It shows where planting trees is OK, and where it's not a great idea. 

Judging from the map, it's A-OK to plant more trees here in Vermont, and anywhere in the eastern United States.