Opinion: Mature Forests Hold the Key to Mitigating Climate Change

Preserving our existing mature forests is essential to any climate change policy we enact. William Moomaw is a physical chemist and environmental scientist who helped start the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University and served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These mature forests hold the key to mitigating climate change. Simply putting more forest into preservation will not mitigate climate change unless we ensure the health of the forest by controlling the invasives. According to climate scientists, to achieve aggressive and effective climate legislation we must immediately preserve our remaining forests and simultaneously fund crews to maintain them.