When agricultural (or similar) lands are transformed back to forests, that has a real and direct effect on the ability of the environment to absorb CO2 emission.
Obviously it needs to be done well, which often is not the case. Quite often there's no tree planted IRL, just some "promise to probably do so in some future" sold instead. And quite often the tree is planted but then abandoned (so that each 2 years everything dies off and the same plot can be re-used to "plant more trees"). But that is not the only modus operandi.
CO2 compensation cannot just be done by planting trees, either. I'm sending a monthly donation to a project that goes into remote villages in Africa where people still cook on open fires and provides portable stoves to them. Since a stove loses much less heat than an open fire, the villagers can cook the same amount of food with only a tenth of the original amount of wood, thereby reducing CO2 emissions.
Curious how much CO2 is emitted by fires in remote African villages compared to, say, power plants in industrialized countries, particularly since all the literature I've seen pins the CO2 issue of late on the industrial revolution.
Still, does sound like a good efficiency gain for those villages.
How much CO2 is emitted in the travel, all the supplies that the travelers have to bring, and the production of the stoves and presumably the refillable fuel containers for them? Meanwhile, the wood has already absorbed CO2 in the process of growing from the air...
