Global evidence that big trees are hugely important for mitigating climate change

We keep hearing from the forest industry that old trees need to be logged to make room for young, fast-growing trees. But old trees are massively important for ecosystem integrity and carbon stocks. When they’re logged, most of the carbon ends up in the atmosphere in short order (very little of it being incorporated into long-lived wood products). It doesn’t matter then how fast-growing the replacement trees are, logging these big old trees will cause a surge in GHG emissions. This page links to four important papers that make the case for old trees.