- To estimate the climate impact of planting forests in different parts of the United States, ecologist Christopher Williams at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, is combining global satellite data collected over more than a decade with carbon-sequestration figures based on data from the US Forest Service. He has found in preliminary work that adding trees to the US west coast and to regions east of the Mississippi River makes sense, climatically speaking. But albedo changes make forest planting in the Rockies and the southwestern United States a bad deal for the climate in most cases, because the conifers that thrive in those regions are dark and absorb more sunlight than do underlying soils or snow. He hopes to turn this research into a standardized methodology that forest managers can use to assess a project’s climate impact.
Getting planners to adopt such methods could prove challenging, however. Williams has found that some resist considering albedo effects, including representatives of companies hoping to sell carbon credits for forest projects. “Even other scientists sometimes have disbelief in the magnitude of the albedo effect, or even its existence,” he says.
Honestly, I'm a little surprised to see this. I wouldn't feign to be an expert or anything, but I love reading articles about ecological restoration when I get the chance and while it's not always brought up, people discussing how to factor in the albedo effect is something that I see discussed often enough. I kind of just assumed it was an issue that was widely known about, accepted, and kept in mind when trying to plan projects. It makes me wonder how great the divide is in the scientific community. On a related note, part of the discussion around the albedo effect involves how we design our cities. There are tons of interesting articles out there, but Wikipedia offers a great summary on the causes of and how we're trying to address The Urban Heat Island Effect. Oh. Shoot. It says as a new user I cannot share links. If anyone is interested in looking more into these things, try looking up terms such as Urban Heat Island Effect Climate Engineering Ecological Restoration Ecological Construction And if you wanna go further down the rabbit hole, look up terms like Bioremediation, Phytoremediation and/or Hyperaccumulators That's what I'm currently looking into myself and some of the articles are downright interesting. There's tons of cool stuff out there.Getting planners to adopt such methods could prove challenging, however. Williams has found that some resist considering albedo effects, including representatives of companies hoping to sell carbon credits for forest projects. “Even other scientists sometimes have disbelief in the magnitude of the albedo effect, or even its existence,” he says.
I feel you. Sometimes it feels like if we're ever really going to get anywhere, we need to stop viewing and judging our ecological actions through an economic lens and start viewing and judging our economic actions through an ecological lens.