You may see a tree as an ephemeral carbon storage, but the forest is a much, much long term storage, that can be considered permanent (unless catastrophic fire)

You may see a tree as an ephemeral carbon storage, but the forest is a much, much long term storage, that can be considered permanent (unless catastrophic fire). The forest, at each time point, contains many trees, growing ones, dying ones, decomposing ones, seeds, etc. But its overall solid carbon mass is strictly positive and larger than, say, a meadow, and if you have the right conditions it can be slowly growing year after year. So planting trees is a way to store carbon, just not to be thought at the tree scale, more like at the forest scale. Edit: a lot of carbon is stored in the soil, too, especially in the thick humus of a healthy forest. Even if each individual component of the humus is decaying, disappearing and replaced by new fallen leaves etc, the humus layer itself is not going anywhere.