Climate change could be paused by planting trees, researchers say, as they map out available land

Australia is one of six countries that together hold around 50 per cent of the world’s tree planting potential. Planting trees to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere seems like a no-brainer in the fight against climate change. But until recently it’s not been clear how much land we’d need to make a tangible difference to warming, and whether we’d need to reclaim farm and residential land to do it. Researchers identified 0.9 billion hectares of land that is available to be reforested That could buy us a 20 year pause in climate warming Coastal ecosystems are capable of storing carbon up to 40 times faster than forests and should also be considered, expert says Now new research published today in Science estimates there’s enough suitable unused land on the globe for reforestation to store around 205 gigatonnes of carbon. That’s enough to buy us about 20 years in the fight against climate change, according to researcher Jean-Francois Bastin from the Institute of Integrative Biology in Zurich. The researchers started by modelling the amount of tree cover the earth could sustain under current environmental conditions, if there were no humans on the planet. They considered local […]

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