Policymakers often ignore forest regeneration in fight against climate change, research finds

Straits Times

24-06-2025

FILE PHOTO: A drone views shows fallen trees in a secondary forest where farmers (not pictured) were in the last stages of clearing land as soybean farming expanded in the Amazon, in Santarem, Para state, Brazil October 6, 2024. REUTERS/Amanda Perobelli/File Photo
Naturally-regenerating forests are often ignored by policymakers working to curb climate change even though they hold an untapped potential to rapidly absorb planet-warming carbon from the atmosphere, scientists found in a research paper published Tuesday.
These so-called secondary forests, which have regenerated themselves after being razed, often for agriculture, can help bring the world closer to the net-zero emissions target needed to slow global warming, the research published in the journal Nature Climate Change shows.
That is because these young forests, which are made of trees between two and four decades old, can remove carbon from the atmosphere up to eight times faster per hectare than forests that were just planted, they found.
It comes as companies worldwide are raising millions of dollars to regrow forests from scratch to generate carbon credits they can sell to polluting industries seeking to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
Secondary forests, on the other hand, are often not allowed to regenerate themselves for long enough to benefit the climate, either because they are cleared or because they fall prey to fires or pests.
Across the tropics, they found, only 6% of secondary forests reach two decades of regrowth.
"It's a constant cycle of deforestation," said Nathaniel Robinson, one of the authors and a scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry. He added that their vulnerability "is likely tied to policy loopholes."
Robin Chazdon, a research professor at the Forest Research Institute of the University of the Sunshine Coast, in Australia, who was not involved, said the refined evaluation of the global carbon mitigation potential of regrowing forests had important implications that could shape new climate policy.
Last week, Reuters revealed how a loophole in the Amazon Soy Moratorium, an agreement signed by the world's top grain traders that they would not buy soy grown on recently deforested land, has allowed Brazilian farmers to market soy grown in razed secondary forests as deforestation-free.
The Moratorium, like many conservation policies around the world, protects old-growth rainforests, but not regrown ones. In the Brazilian Amazon, half of secondary forests are cleared within eight years of regrowing, the scientists found.
"The most rapid and largest carbon removal comes from these young secondary forests," said Susan Cook-Patton, a reforestation scientist at The Nature Conservancy, and one of the authors. But, she added, these forests "just aren't often appreciated." REUTERS
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