Planting trees is widely recognized as a climate-change solution. But what if those trees go up in flames?

Converting the grasslands of African savannas into new forests poses a fire risk that could call into question its proclaimed benefit, according to a recent study published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

“If you’re doing it for carbon credits, the probability that these trees are going to stay there in the long term is fairly low because you’ve planted them in a flammable system,” said lead author Nicola Stevens, Trapnell Research Fellow in African environments at the University of Oxford in the U.K. Colleagues elsewhere are disputing the team’s analysis, part of a vigorous ongoing debate.

The Bonn Challenge, a globally funded IUCN initiative, set a goal more than a decade ago to plant trees across 350 million hectares (860 million acres) of land by 2030. Of the 74 pledges to join the challenge, 42% are in Africa. The African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) is leading the tree-planting effort there.

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