How Much Can Trees Fight Climate Change? Massively, but Not Alone, Study Finds.

Restoring global forests where they occur naturally could potentially capture an additional 226 gigatons of planet-warming carbon, equivalent to about a third of the amount that humans have released since the beginning of the Industrial Era, according to a new study . The research, with input from more than 200 authors, leveraged vast troves of data collected by satellites and on the ground and was partly an effort to address the controversy surrounding an earlier paper. That study, in 2019, helped to spur the but also caused a scientific uproar. The new conclusions were similar to those in a . Mainly, the extra storage capacity would come from allowing existing forests to recover to maturity. But major caveats remain: If we protect all current forests, where will people get timber, rubber and palm oil? Would forests be able to store carbon quickly enough? And how much forest carbon would be lost to fire, drought and pests as climate change intensifies? The 226 gigatons of storage cannot be achieved without cutting greenhouse gas emissions, said Thomas Crowther, the studys senior author and a professor of ecology at ETH Zurich, a university in Switzerland. If we continue emitting carbon, as weve done to date, then droughts and fires and other extreme events will continue to threaten the scale of the global forest system, further limiting its potential to contribute. Forests are essential to tackling both the climate and biodiversity crises. They offer food, shelter and shade to humans and countless other species. They clean our air and water. And they pull climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere. As the climate crisis intensifies, that ability has made them controversial: How much can we rely on trees to get us out of this mess? We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and your Times account, or for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? . Want all of The Times? .