Why I (Heart) Trees

I've expressed my undying love for trees before, particularly as a way of preserving our atmospheric commons, but I had no idea that they were this good:

'Every year, the expanding European forests remove a surprisingly large amount of carbon from the atmosphere,' the study's co-author Aapo Rautiainen stresses. 'According to rough estimates, their impact in reducing atmospheric carbon may well be twice that achieved by the use of renewable energy in Europe today.'

So what's the obvious lesson to learn from this? Why, that they should be included in calculations of carbon sinks - and that countries who plant more trees/don't cut down the ones they have should be rewarded in terms of carbon credits:

Under the Kyoto Protocol, countries currently do not get emission credits for increasing natural carbon sinks through forestry and agriculture. The Finnish researcher's suggest, however, that this might be a helpful tool. 'Policies that accelerate the expansion of our forest biomass not only represent a win-win for climate change and biodiversity, they also open up economic opportunities,' states Laura Saikku, the third author of the study. 'Land owners can benefit with new industries like forest-based bio-energy production. This could also help to reduce one of the main threats to sustained forest expansion - the need to open land to produce agricultural biofuels as alternatives to fossil fuels.'

Obvious, really.