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| Preserve Forests |
Adding 2.2 billion acres of tree cover would capture two-thirds of man-made carbon emissions, a new study found.
Allowing the earth’s forests to recover could soak up a
significant amount of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to
new research.
The worldwide assessment of current and potential forestation using satellite imagery appeared Thursday in the journal Science.
It estimates that letting saplings regrow on land where forests have
been cleared would increase global forested area by one-third and remove
205 billion metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere. That’s
two-thirds of the roughly 300 billion metric tons of carbon humans have
put up there since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
“The point is that [reforestation is] so much more vastly
powerful than anyone ever expected,” said Thomas Crowther, a professor
of environmental systems science at ETH Zurich and a co-author of the
paper. “By far, it’s the top climate change solution in terms of carbon
storage potential.”
Some climate scientists who were not involved with the study disagree
with its calculations and are warning against its “silver bullet”
message. Still, supporting natural systems that can soak up carbon is
widely accepted as a major component of any climate change mitigation
strategy — in addition to deploying clean energy, switching to electric
vehicles, and curbing consumption overall.
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