Tree plantations threaten tropical jungle biodiversity

Monoculture tree planting schemes threaten tropical biodiversity but provide only modest climate benefits. Environmentalists warned about this, pointing to the ecosystems of the Amazon and Congo river basins. In an article for Trends in Ecology&Evolution The growing popularity of commercial pine, eucalyptus and teak plantations in the tropics to offset carbon emissions is having unintended consequences, such as drying out local ecosystems, acidifying soils, crowding out native plants and wildfires, environmentalists said.

Amid a boom in single-species plantations to sequester carbon, scientists have called on governments to prioritize conservation and restoration of native forests over commercial monocultures, and warned that planting strips of alien trees in tropical regions threatens unique flora and fauna.

“Despite the wide range of ecosystem services provided by tropical ecosystems, society has reduced the value of these ecosystems to only one indicator: carbon,” the document says.

“Maximizing standing carbon stocks is widely believed to also benefit biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and enhance socio-economic co-benefits, but this is often not the case,” they explained.

Tree planting is considered an important tool for mitigating the effects of global warming, with dozens of public and private initiatives underway to rapidly increase forest cover around the world to achieve net-zero emissions goals. However, research shows that environmental benefits depend largely on the scale and type of restoration and require vast areas of land. One 2019 study estimates that restoring natural forests could produce 40 times more carbon than plantations.