>It's like saying that if cancer treatment only extends your life by 5-10 years, it had no value. My understanding is that it's like taking a cancer treatment,

>It's like saying that if cancer treatment only extends your life by 5-10 years, it had no value. My understanding is that it's like taking a cancer treatment, and the cancer is unaffected, but at least we got free t-shirts from the cancer clinic. >We are in a worse state not because of the additional trees, but because of other behaviors. The article says the new trees and forests are not equivalent to the used trees and previous forests: >Tree cover is not necessarily forest cover. Industrial timber plantations, mature oil palm estates, and other non-natural "planted forests" qualify as tree cover. For example, cutting down a 100-hectare tract of primary forest and replacing it with a 100-hectare palm plantation will show up in the data as no net change in forest cover: the 100-hectare loss is perfectly offset by the 100-hectare gain in tree cover. That activity would be counted as "deforestation" by the FAO. Therefore, tree cover loss does not directly translate to deforestation in all cases.