A study by Swiss scientists claims that the most effective way to fight global warming is to plant lots of trees, probably one trillion of them.
The study, published in Thursday’s journal Science, says that the area required to accommodate the trees is nine million square kilometres, roughly the size of the United States of America.
According to the study, over the decades, those new trees could suck up nearly 750 billion tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Study co-author, Thomas Crowther, a climate change ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich said:
This is by far – by thousands of times – the cheapest climate change solution.
We all knew restoring forests could play a part in tackling climate change, but we had no scientific understanding of what impact this could make.
Our study shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today.
However, some experts not involved with the study expressed scepticism about some of the study’s findings. Myles Allen, a geosystem science professor at Oxford had this to say:
Restoration of trees may be ‘among the most effective strategies’, but it is very far indeed from ‘the best climate change solution available’, and a long way behind reducing fossil fuel emissions to net-zero.
Yes, heroic reforestation can help, but it is time to stop suggesting there is a ‘nature-based solution’ to ongoing fossil fuel use. There isn’t. Sorry.