Climate change impact on forests

Climate change will likely have devastating impact on our entire environment, and forests are no exception. Today we are worried by the massive deforestation in many parts of the world, and in years to come climate change will likely be the No.1 threat to forests on our planet.

Climate change will cause change is season lengths, summers will be much warmer and drier, and extreme weather events will also be more frequent, and thus doing more damage to our forests. Due to these factors, in many areas around the globe tree growth will experience severe decline, frequent droughts will increase the number of wildfires, and there will likely be more pests and diseases doing an extra damage.

Not all tree species will be able to adapt to these changes, and our forests will certainly look much different in future than they are looking now. Can we somehow help our forests to adapt to climate change?

Successful global forest management is the key to help our forests, but this success won't come easy. This is because forest managers first need to anticipate future climate changes in order to choose the best possible solution. With so many different factors involved in climate change, there is impossible to guarantee certainty of some future climate change prediction, meaning that lot of it will depend on luck.

Doing nothing is not the answer. It is better to try and fail than not doing nothing at all. But how can we help, and what should we do? Planting more trees is certainly something that can be helpful, but we must act right away because the trees we plant today will be reaching maturity in 50 to 100 years from now, and they'll be living in completely different climate.

We need our forests now, and we'll certainly need them in future so we have to do anything to protect them, and keep them for our future generations. Without our forests climate change impact would be far greater because they absorb huge quantities of carbon dioxide so we really have to protect them at any cost.