While recovering from a very minor surgery in hospital, I looked out over the top of a Jamun (Syzygium cumini) tree. Jamun is one of the fastest growing trees of India. In about 6-8 years it grows to a height of about 10 meters, and it lives for about a 100 years. It begins to fruit when it is about 8 years old, and continues to yield a good crop until it is well over 60. I love this fruit, and look forward to the hot time of the year for it. The tree is hardy and grows well enough to be considered invasive in some parts of the world. If you are interested in carbon mitigation through planting trees, this should be a great choice. But how much carbon does it bind?
A decade old tree is about a meter in perimeter, which means that with a height of 10 meters, its volume is 10/(4π) meter3, which is about 0.8 meter3. Jamun is one of the denser woods, with a specific gravity of 0.7. This means that a 10 meter tall tree weighs about half a metric ton. About half the weight of the wood would be carbon (the rest is essentially hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen). Planting about twelve billion new jamun trees would be sufficient to capture the carbon that India emits in a year, for every year in the next decade or so.
Typically a jamun orchard will have a spacing of about 10 meters between trees. This means that one tree is usually planted in about 100 meter2 of area, which is about 10,000 every km2. India has an area of 3.2 million km2. So planting enough Jamun trees to capture the carbon that we emit would take about 12% of India’s land area. This is a little larger than the area of France. However, this will have to be well drained loamy soil, with sufficient water. That would be about one fifth of the agricultural land in the country.
It already sounds pretty hard. But then I found that an increase in tree cover by 2261 kilometer2 in two years was considered celebratory news. This, as you can see from the numbers above, is the area needed for about 0.02% (1 out of every 5000) of the trees one needs to plant! Maybe that means that planting enough trees to mitigate carbon emission is in the realm of pipe dreams. I’ve talked about a fast growing tree, because it would absorb carbon fast. If we take slower growing trees like teak or pine, then we would need to plant more of them to absorb carbon at the same rate.
Trees are good. Trees are healthy. Trees allow other vegetation to grow beneath it. Trees are needed to slowly suck the carbon out of the air. But today’s meditation convinces me that planting trees is no miracle cure to the climate change problem, no more than covering a pot while cooking is a solution. Pollution is a structural problem, and one needs structural changes for that. Making more efficient use of electricity is better. If I had another day in the hospital, I might have been able to calculate how much energy we can save my going off all social media altogether.
And since I’m joining in (against all good sense) to a challenge which asks us to show three photos, I must add that one should extend the title of this post and say that threes are not enough either.
A good post (and get well soon!) 😊🙏
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Thanks. Recovered in a couple of days, thanks.
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That’s good. You are welcome 🙏
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Love your calculations here…and I wish we could catch all that carbon…Maybe if you had stayed for some days more everything would have been solved?
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I wish staying in a hospital for a few days was the solution to everything 🙂
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I wish that too… a simple solution is what we all want…
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That is absolutely true. Trees do not solve the existant problem of polution, which as we know is man made. Why offset when cleaning in the long term makes more sense. Unfortunately, it sounds good to plant trees while actually solving the problem is not in the interest of politics or business.
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Trees are part of the answer, I believe, but it seems to be too small a part to be more than greenwashing
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I (Kellye) hope you are feeling well now. The world needs to work on the climate issues as one.
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Yes, thanks for asking.
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Wow. GREAT post I. J. Very insightful and thought-provoking. I’m sure we’ve all heard of the deforestation of the Amazon region. I’ve also heard of massive deforestation in Indonesia so they can grow palms, I think, for palm oil, which apparently is used in almost EVERYTHING. Yes, we need to grow more trees, and REDUCE our consumption of other things.
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Not directly related, perhaps, but there is a noteworthy article with informative side-links on CNN today about electricity production and storage: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/01/world/water-battery-switzerland-renewable-energy-climate-scn-hnk-spc-intl/index.html
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Technologies such as this could be a part of the solution. But I wish the search had started in the 1970s, not now.
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Thank you. Working through this was an eye-opener for me too
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Haha, ‘threes are not enough’ – I like that 😆
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🙂
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Good wishes for your continued recovery.
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Thank you
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Some think we should fight the effects, others want to prevent the causes. As always, the truth lies in the middle. Chemically, CO2 is a simple thing, but very complex when it comes to climate change.
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Or perhaps both?
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