How much carbon does the tree outside your window store, and how does that compare to the carbon we emit when we travel or power our homes? Watch this video with a forest ecologist to find out.   "Clearly, a living tree has a lot to offer beyond the makings of a kitchen cabinet." — Randy Edwards  Test Your Knowledge   Protecting 1 acre of mature forest from destruction reduces the same amount of emissions that your car produces in about 30 years. Learn this and more with our interactive climate change quiz.

By Randy Edwards

As a teenager in the early 1900s, my grandfather and his father maneuvered a portable, steam-driven sawmill across northern Ohio, turning mixed hardwood forests into factory-ready lumber.

Hickory was for brush handles, basswood for beehives, and pine went to the local paper mill for pulp. Not a stem was left standing when they cleared a forest.

When I was a child, long after my grandfather switched from timber to sheep farming, we would walk in the small woods that lined his pasture. By then there wasn’t much left of the vast forests that once covered the region. They were plowed under for farms, then paved over for houses and shopping malls. When I asked him, 75 years after the fact, if we should have left some of those forests standing, he waved off the question.

“Nah,” he said. “The land was worth more cleared.”

He was right. In his time, a forest was valuable only when it was cut down.

That reality hasn’t changed much since my grandfather’s day – until now. Scientists are learning more each year about the important role forests play in keeping our climate stable by capturing and storing carbon dioxide, the most common of the greenhouse gases. With the help from organizations like The Nature Conservancy, people around the world are beginning to appreciate living forests.

Forests and Climate Change

As an adult I came to appreciate the other services forests provide to people and the land. Like all green plants, trees provide oxygen, of course, but they also give us shade, cool the air and filter the water that runs off the land and into the lakes and streams that we use for drinking water. A thick forest corridor keeps our streams healthy by trapping sediment, cooling the water and sloughing off the nutrient-rich plant material that serves as the foundation of the aquatic food chain.

In recent years, though, I’ve also heard much about how cutting and burning forests accounts for roughly 20 percent of global carbon emissions, more than the climate-changing pollution caused by all the planes, trains and automobiles in the world. Trees take in carbon dioxide and hold onto it, in their limbs and branches and in the soil around their roots. Halting deforestation over the next 15 years would make a huge difference in reducing those carbon emissions, slowing global temperature growth, and, perhaps, preventing the most catastrophic climate change projections from coming true.

Clearly, a living tree has a lot to offer beyond the makings of a kitchen cabinet. But knowing the science isn’t enough. My grandfather cut trees because he could make money at it. He looked at a tree with a merchant’s eye, seeing its future in house framing, flooring or furniture. In many parts of the world, deforestation continues to be seen as the pathway to economic success.

What’s a Forest Worth?

That’s the case in Indonesia, where tropical rainforests are being cut down at an alarming rate to make way for profitable palm oil plantations, producing 80 percent of the country’s carbon emissions and placing it among the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases.  Here, and in other places around the world, the Conservancy is helping landowners and communities exploit the growing demand for carbon credits – allowances that can be traded on the open market to help balance carbon dioxide emissions elsewhere in the world.

By accurately measuring the amount of carbon that is captured and stored in these forests, we can help these countries benefit from carbon trading while at the same time protecting habitat for endangered wildlife and protecting the water quality and the livelihoods of local communities. We’re working closer to home, too, developing forest carbon projects in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and other parts of the country.

And to make sure the demand for forest protection stays strong, we’ll be in Copenhagen this December, when the world’s governments meet at the United Nations climate change conference, to help ensure world leaders know how important it is to make forest protection part of a comprehensive effort to combat climate change.

I have my own grandchildren now, but they’re still too young to know much about forests, except that they’re a fun place to walk in, listen to the birds and sneak up on deer. If the Conservancy is successful in Copenhagen, and in developing forest carbon projects around the world, there’s a good chance that my grandchildren will grow up in a world where forests are appreciated in a way that would have made my grandfather scratch his head – worth more standing than land is cleared.

Randy Edwards is a Senior Media Relations Manager based in Dublin, Ohio

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Erin Baker (Randy Edwards hopes his grandson, seen above with his father, grows up in a world where forests are worth more standing.); Photo © Ctd 2005's/Creative Commons (Moon silhoutted trees mosaic).