The Role, Issues, and Challenges of Afforestation in Climate Change Mitigation

Abstract

Afforestation can contribute to climate-change mitigation when tree establishment is matched to ecological context and sustained by long-term management, but its net climatic effect is not uniformly cooling. Existing syntheses often emphasize carbon sequestration while treating biophysical, hydrological, disturbance, and socioeconomic evidence separately. Here, we provide a structured integrative review. We distinguish afforestation from reforestation, natural regeneration, forest restoration, and improved management. We explicitly assess evidence from global modeling, remote sensing, meta-analyses, long-term observations, and regional case studies. Global forests cover about 4.14 billion ha in 2025, while annual net forest loss remained about 4.12 million ha yr−1 during 2015–2025. Global forests were a sink of about 3.5 ± 0.4 Pg C yr−1 in the 2010s, but this existing-forest sink should not be interpreted as an afforestation-specific removal rate. Humid tropical and subtropical regions generally have the greatest potential for net climatic cooling. In contrast, afforestation at snow-covered high latitudes may cause substantial albedo-driven warming, while water-limited regions require careful species selection and conservative planting densities. Soil carbon gains are most consistent on former croplands and other low-carbon degraded lands, but responses on carbon-rich grasslands are highly variable. Long-term benefits further depend on disturbance resilience, permanence, land competition, financing, and credible monitoring. Additionally, we identify five priorities for the future: climate-smart adaptive silviculture, digital forestry with field-calibrated uncertainty, permanence and disturbance-risk accounting, sustainable forest bioeconomy, and integrated international governance and finance.