Mark Tutton: Restoring forests could capture two-thirds of the carbon humans have added to the atmosphere
Restoring the world's
lost forests could remove two thirds of all the planet-warming carbon that is
in the atmosphere because of human activity, according to a new study. Since the industrial
revolution, humans have added around 300 billion tons of extra carbon to the
atmosphere -- mainly through burning fossil fuels -- which is heating the
planet to dangerous levels. But trees naturally remove carbon from the
atmosphere, storing it above and below ground. A new study, carried
out by researchers at Swiss university ETH Zurich and published in the
journal Science, has calculated that restoring degraded forests all over the
world could capture about 205 billion tons of carbon in total. Global carbon
emissions are currently around 10 billion tons per year
A map from the study, showing the potential for tree cover excluding desert, agricultural & urban areas
Degraded forests: The researchers identified ecosystems
around the world that would naturally support some level of tree cover, but
have become "degraded" -- deforested for timber, for example, or
turned into farmland that has since been abandoned. They excluded areas that
are currently used as urban or agricultural land, or that would naturally be
grasslands or wetlands, because these ecosystems can themselves be valuable
carbon stores, as well as supporting biodiversity.
They concluded that there's enough suitable
land to increase the world's forests by about a third. That would give the
planet more than a trillion extra trees and 900 million hectares of additional
tree canopy, an area about the size of the United States. The researchers say
their data shows global tree restoration to be the most effective way to tackle
climate change. Tom Crowther, the
study's senior author, told CNN, "This is way bigger than the next best
solution, and this is by far the cheapest. "The best
restoration projects out there that we know of are restoring billions of trees
at 30 cents a tree. Scaled up to the numbers we're talking about it's $300
billion."
The study found that
most of the land suitable for restoring forests trees is in six countries --
Russia (151 million hectares), USA (103 million hectares), Canada (78 million),
Australia (58 million), Brazil (50 million), and China (40 million)... read more:
