General Article Reforest an area the size of the US to help avert climate breakdown

Topic Selected: Climate Change Book Volume: 357
This article is 4 years old. Click here to view the latest articles for this topic.
Inga Linder/Shutterstock

Mark Maslin, UCL and Simon Lewis, UCL

Restoring the world’s forests on an unprecedented scale is “the best climate change solution available”, according to a new study. The researchers claim that covering 900m hectares of land – roughly the size of the continental US – with trees could store up to 205 billion tonnes of carbon, about two thirds of the carbon that humans have already put into the atmosphere.

While the best solution to climate change remains leaving fossil fuels in the ground, we will still need to suck carbon dioxide (CO₂) out of the atmosphere this century if we are to keep global warming below 1.5˚C. So the idea of reforesting much of the world isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds.

Since the dawn of agriculture, humans have cut down three trillion trees – about half the trees on Earth. Already 43 countries have pledged to restore 292m hectares of degraded land to forest worldwide. That’s an area ten times the size of the UK. But what the new...

Would you like to see the rest of this article and all the other benefits that Issues Online can provide with?

Sign up now for an immediate no obligation FREE TRIAL and view the entire collection