Is Tree Burial a Climate Solution?

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Hart Hagan

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Feb 1, 2026, 11:55:44 AMFeb 1

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Is Tree Burial a Climate Solution?
Free Webinar with Hart Hagan
Monday, Feb. 2 | 7:00–8:30 PM ET
🆓 Registration via Google Form

In recent years, proposals have emerged suggesting that burying woody biomass—or sinking trees into deep ocean environments—could function as a durable form of carbon removal by isolating wood from oxygen and microbial decomposition, thereby preventing the release of CO₂ to the atmosphere. This idea has gained public and scientific attention as a potential negative-emissions strategy in climate mitigation discussions (Orf, 2026, Zen et al, 2024).

This approach, often referred to as Woody Biomass Burial (WBB) or “wood vaulting,” involves placing cleared or waste biomass into large pits, tightly packed and sealed with impermeable clay layers to inhibit aerobic decay.

Experimental and modeling studies suggest that under such oxygen-limited conditions, buried wood could retain ≥99.9% of its carbon over a 100-year period, a claim reflected in updates to harvested wood product accounting frameworks supported by IPCC IN 2019 (Gooding, 2023;)

But critical questions remain:

Is this truly climate-positive when forests are cut?
What are the ecological tradeoffs?
How does this compare to keeping forests standing and alive?
What would happen if that same woody biomass were allowed to decompose on the forest floor?
Is there a price to be paid by removing nutrients and energy from the forest ecosystem?
Are we not crowding out nature and replacing it with a dead industrial system?
What would happen if we gave nature more room to grow creating more space for biodiversity and biomass?
Are we depriving the soil ecosystem of the room it needs to thrive? Would the soil ecosystem not be able to make good use of these woody materials?

Join Hart Hagan for a grounded, science-based conversation unpacking the claims, evidence, and risks behind woody biomass burial.

RSVP: Is Tree Burial a Climate Solution? Monday, Feb. 2 @ 7:00-8:30 (Eastern Time) - Google Forms

Want to go deeper?
This conversation connects directly to Hart’s upcoming course, How Trees & Forests Shape Our Climate, which explores how living, intact forests regulate climate through water cycles, biodiversity, and ecosystem processes—often more effectively than engineered carbon removal schemes.