Climate change poses a profound new threat to forests around the world, as Craig Welch explains in detail elsewhere in this special issue of National Geographic. Deforestation is an older and even larger threat. There is nothing more important that humans can do for forests, which have been on this planet for hundreds of millions of years, than cut our greenhouse gas emissions and stop cutting down old-growth trees.
But climate change won’t be stopped for decades at best, and trees and forests are already confronting it. Scientists are working on solutions to help them adapt. Here we look at four of them.
By Alejandra Borunda