Susan Cook-Patton
Senior Forest Restoration Scientist
Maryland
Areas of Expertise
Reforestation, Forest Restoration, Natural Climate Solutions, Carbon Accounting, Ecosystem Function
Resources
Biography
Dr. Susan Cook-Patton is a Senior Forest Restoration Scientist on The Nature Conservancy’s Natural Climate Solutions Team.
She quantifies the climate mitigation potential of reforestation, agroforestry, and other natural climate solutions, and helps to infuse the best-available science into land management decisions. To do this, she collaborates with scientists across the globe, and from academic, government, and other non-governmental organizations.
Her work can be found in leading journals, such as Nature, Nature Climate Change, Science Advances, and Global Change Biology.
As an avid proponent of effective science communication, she often shares her research via multiple avenues—from LinkedIn posts to videos for grade school classrooms to public lectures to stories covered in major news outlets such as National Public Radio, the BBC and The Guardian.
Before joining the Nature Conservancy in 2016, she was a policy fellow at the US Forest Service and a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. Susan holds a PhD in Community Ecology from Cornell University, and Bachelor degrees in Biology, Psychology and English from Indiana University.
A Summary of the Latest Forest Restoration Science
By Susan Cook-Patton
Updated: November 20, 2024
Forests are a tried-and-true natural climate solution. For eons, trees have pulled carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere through the oldest carbon-capture technology on Earth, photosynthesis. Trees contribute to climate action by helping to remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it into the wood of the trees themselves.
Forests also give us clean air, clean water, and habitat for wildlife. They support local and regional economies, and Indigenous peoples and local communities. Trees make us more resilient to extreme heat and flooding, and they boost our emotional and physical well-being. Yet around the world, we’ve lost forests to cities, minelands and farmlands. While protecting existing forests is more cost-, carbon-, and biodiversity-effective than restoring forests, there remains ample opportunity to regrow trees, especially in places where the land is now degraded.
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TNC's science works to home in on the places with the greatest climate returns per hectare of investment in reforestation and agroforestry. We do this by developing maps—really menus of options—for where trees could be restored to the landscape.
In the US, for example, we find up to 148 million acres of opportunity for reforestation. We show these areas with a web-based tool called the Reforestation Hub that maps out relatively low-cost and more feasible options for reforestation, allowing users to find the places that can provide the carbon and other benefits they seek from reforestation.
We also map how much climate mitigation can be achieved by restoring trees to the landscape and how that varies depending on method. While we always target places where trees naturally occur, there are multiple methods for restoring forest cover—ranging from natural regrowth when growing conditions are right, to active planting when the forests need help recovering, to plantations and agroforestry where livelihoods and food production are paramount.
Natural regrowth can be a highly cost-effective method for restoring forest cover, but the carbon returns can vary 100-fold across the globe. Carbon accumulation in plantations can vary depending on the species used and management practices, and in particular diversifying plantations can increase the likelihood of planting success and boost carbon accumulation. Similarly, carbon returns from agroforestry can be especially wide-ranging given the sheer diversity of practices used across the globe—from dense multi-layered homegardens to individual trees within grazing lands. To help local communities and other decision makers find the right approach for their landscape, we create maps and tools that give people carbon estimates based on the best available science.
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Beyond carbon accumulation, the broader benefits of reforestation and agroforestry can depend on where a project occurs.
In some places, reforestation can cause global warming rather than cooling due to changes in albedo (i.e., how much sunlight is reflected from the Earth’s surface) so we developed maps to help steer projects away from these global warming zones. At the local level, trees generally provide cooling by releasing moisture into the air and providing shade. Our work shows how widespread those local cooling benefits can be across the globe and within grazing lands where livestock and rural workers are often exposed to extreme temperatures. We also show that those cooling and health benefits are not equitably distributed, and that there is more work to go.
While restoring tree cover across the globe is not the sole solution to climate change, it remains one of the most cost-effective carbon removal strategies we have. And it has the potential to provide many benefits to people—helping to restore balance to the ecosystem, support economic opportunities for local communities, and tackle the combined challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.
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Successful Reforestation Is Keeping the Eastern U.S. Cooler
Parts of the southeastern and central U.S. haven’t warmed as much as the rest of the country. Reforestation could be partially responsible for this “warming hole” Read more
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How do you save a rainforest? Leave it alone.
Research shows that, instead of replanting rainforests, allowing them to bounce back naturally would store loads of carbon. Read more
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Planting trees in wrong places heats the planet: study
Planting trees in the wrong places can actually contribute to global warming, scientists said on Tuesday, but a new map identifies the best locations to regrow forests and cool the planet. Read more
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Trees are spreading across the Great Plains
We normally think of trees as being good for the environment. But in parts of the Midwest and Great Plains, they're heating up the earth as woodlands take over grasslands. Listen
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Hold the tree planting: Protect ecosystems first for maximum carbon storage
By comparing different natural climate solutions against four criteria, the study proposes a hierarchy: protect ecosystems first, then improve their management, and lastly restore them. Read more
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Leaving forests to regrow naturally 'could be better option than replanting
Study says potential for natural regrowth to absorb carbon has been substantially underestimated Read more
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Natural Debate: Do Forests Grow Better With Our Help or Without?
Nations around the world are pledging to plant billions of trees. But a new study shows that the potential for natural forest regrowth to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and fight climate change is far greater than has previously thought. Read more
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Can planting trees tackle climate change?
We examine the extent to which planting trees could help to mitigate climate change. Listen
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‘Biodiversitree’ Project Studies Health Of Tree Species
If and exactly how biodiversity helps forests survive. Read more
Results
More about Reforestation
It’s Time to Embrace the Potential of Agroforestry as a Climate Solution
Adding native trees to agricultural lands not only supports biodiversity and improves farmer livelihoods—it can help address the climate crisis at a global scale.
Reforestation Hub
The Reforestation Hub identifies up to 148 million acres of total opportunity for reforestation, which could capture up to 535 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
New maps help decision-makers factor albedo into tree-planting plans
Albedo can cause large reductions to the climate benefit of tree planting – but new science helps identify locations with greatest climate-cooling potential