The world’s forests are recovering, helping slow the Earth’s warming — at least in temperate and polar areas. This isn’t the first time this happened. In the 16th and 17th Century, forests expanded in the Americas, as European diseases wiped out much of the Native American population, resulting in their land reverting to forest.
But in this century, the expansion of forest is due to happier causes, such as more efficient agriculture, and the replacement of horses with automobiles. The automobile restored New England’s forests, which had mostly disappeared by 1910, but now cover much of the region. Today, Vermont is 78% forested, but in 1910, it was mostly un-forested.
England has slightly more forest now than it did during the Black Death around 1350, even though England today has a dozen times as many people as it did back then. Scotland has many times more forest than it did in 1350. The United Kingdom as a whole has three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.
China’s forests have grown by about 234,000 square miles over the last 30 years, an area the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area the size of Cambodia to its woodlands. Many tropical forests are still shrinking, but temperate forests are expanding slightly faster than tropical forests are shrinking, meaning that trees are still removing at least as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they used to.
Even in some tropical countries, forests are expanding. Costa Rica has 150% more forest than it did in 1987, and about as much forest as it did in 1961 — although still less than it had in the 1940s and 1950s.
As David Ficking notes,
Remarkably, this may not be the first time human activities caused an expansion of the world’s forests. The devastating population declines caused by war and disease after the European colonization of the Americas may have caused a downturn in global temperatures between the 16th and 19th centuries, according to one 2019 analysis. With their populations reduced to about 10% of previous numbers, Indigenous people were no longer able to maintain agricultural systems based on clearing land with fire. As a result, 558,000 square kilometers of new woodlands grew, sufficient to lock away about 27 billion tons of CO2.
Nor is global afforestation to date caused mainly by environmental imperatives. Indeed, in much of the world, it has been the rise of fossil fuels that turned the corner on deforestation almost a century ago, as industries turned to coal, oil and gas to produce heat and energy in place of wood.
More than a quarter of Japan is covered with planted forests that in many cases are so old they’re barely recognized as such. Forest cover reached its lowest extent during World War II, when trees were felled by the million to provide fuel for a resource-poor nation’s war machine. Akita prefecture in the north of Honshu island was so denuded in the early 19th century that it needed to import firewood. These days, its lush woodlands are a major draw for tourists.
It’s a similar picture in Scandinavia and Central Europe, where the spread of forests onto unproductive agricultural land, combined with the decline of wood-based industries and better management of remaining stands, has resulted in extensive regrowth since the mid-20th century. Forests cover about 15% of Denmark, compared to 2% to 3% at the start of the 19th century.
A baby beaver was recently born in London, the first beaver birth there in 400 years. Recently, carnivorous plants were reintroduced to English wetlands.
Sea turtles are proliferating, with sea turtle nests tripling in Florida. Fish species are rebounding off the coast of California due to their young finding a sanctuary in abandoned oil rigs.
A dog recently discovered a species of mole long thought to be extinct, De Winton’s golden mole.
Below is a map of Costa Rica’s forests showing how they grew after earlier shrinking:
