Let's conserve the old -- and imagine the new

William Moomaw is an environmental scientist who helped found the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and served as lead author on five reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This guy has been in the thick climate science. And he thinks we're making a mistake if we concentrate entirely on planting new trees; it's the middle-aged and old trees that perform the most carbon capture. We've allowed the economic benefits of managing forests to harvest young trees for burning pellets to blind us to the superior carbon carrying capacity of multi-age forests.

... in multi-aged forests around the world of all types [studies found] half of the carbon is stored in the largest one-percent diameter trees. So I began thinking about this, and I realized that the most effective thing that we can do is to allow trees that are already planted, that are already growing, to continue growing to reach their ecological potential, to store carbon, and develop a forest that has its full complement of environmental services.

... in order to meet our climate goals, we have to have greater sequestration by natural systems now. So that entails protecting the carbon stocks that we already have in forests, or at least a large enough fraction of them that they matter.

Grist

...Meanwhile, there's no reason we can't find new places to plant young trees, if we'll just use our imaginations. And Italian architectural firm has built a forest in urban Milan.
I'd call this magical.

H/t Time Goes By.