Planting Trillions of Trees will Cancel Out Decades of CO2 Emission say ScientistsThere is enough room in the world’s existing parks, forests, deserts and abandoned land to plant trillions of additional trees, which would have the CO2 storage capacity to cancel out decades of carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new analysis by ecologist Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university.
Trees are “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change,” Crowther told The Independent. Combining forest inventory data from 1.2 million locations around the world and satellite images, the scientists estimate there are 3 trillion trees on Earth — seven times more than previous estimates. and they also found that there is abundant space to restore millions of acres of additional forests, not counting urban and agricultural land.“There’s 400 gigatons [of CO2 stored] now in the 3 trillion trees,” Crowther said. “If we were to scale that up by Planting trillions of more trees now, because that’s in the order of hundreds of gigatons captured from the atmosphere – and anthropogenic emissions will completely be wiped out.”
