Mark Tutton: Restoring forests could capture two-thirds of the carbon humans have added to the atmosphere

By Dilip -
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 fom the study, showing the potential for tree cover, excluding desert, agricultural and urban areas.
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.

One million species threatened with extinction
Global climate targets will be missed as deforestation rises, study says
Read: Amazon destruction accelerates 60% to one and a half soccer fields every minute

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:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/04/world/forests-capture-two-thirds-of-carbon-emissions-scn-intl/index.html


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