Afforestation as a Sustainability Tactic?

 


Figure 1: The location of the New York City Afforestation Project research plots (Oldfield et al., 2013).


           Afforestation projects are commonly carried out on areas that have been converted from an urban to industrial land. However, the potential of conducting afforestation on land that has not been previously utilized such as in New York City opens the topic on soil restoration. The question in research is if urban soil quality could be improved through site preparation and management because the soil must be healthy enough to provide the necessary chemical and biological conditions for growing vegetation. The results concluded that the question was found to be probable as it improved infiltration, decomposition, mineralization, and nutrient retention of urban soil (Oldfield et al., 2014). There was a decrease in bulk density (1.4 to 0.72 g cm-3), a pH decrease in soil acidity (pH 7.36 to 7.04), and significant increases in microbially-available carbon, biomass, and soil carbon concentration (Oldfield et al., 2014). This indicated that urban soil may be improving its quality to perform cycling and transformations of trees. To elaborate, afforestation can be a key to sustainability because forests can cycle toxic carbon out from the atmosphere and through photosynthesis, convert it into biomass. Environmental sustainability focuses on the maintenance of capital in which we protect and conserve where our natural resource derive from. The trade-off would be that as we focus on environmental degradation (improving the soil quality from the impacts of dense, urban areas) and through research gain knowledge of the this topic, we can participate in environmental restoration that will increase the welfare for humans in the future by reducing the carbon footprint.

Oldfield, E. E., Felson, A. J., Wood, S. A., Hallett, R. A., Strickland, M. S., and Bradford, M. A. (2014). Positive effects of afforestation efforts on the health of urban soils. Forest Ecology and Management. Elsevier, Inc. 313(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2013.11.027


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