The author of the study also said: plant now so that the tree can still grow, so that it can help us later.
A team of scientists working at the Crowther Laboratory, at ETH Zurich University, have announced the most effective way to combat climate change: on the whole Earth, there are about 0.9 billion hectares. – We can plant forests , and if we green all that land, the trees planted will absorb about a quarter of the carbon emissions that humans emit into the environment.
Instead of finding solutions to absorb CO 2 or researching an alternative technology, the team focused on finding a way to save the environment and be environmentally friendly, a “green solution”. In the new study, and the world’s first report on the matter, they show the ideal planting locations and the amount of carbon they would absorb.
There are about 0.9 billion hectares of land that can be planted with forests.
François Bastin, head of the study, explains: “There is one aspect of this that is just as important as the calculations we made: we removed urban land and areas of agricultural land, because these lands are important to human society”.
The calculation of the amount of trees that need to be planted, given the current weather conditions, gives the following result: the area of land that can be used to grow crops on Earth is currently 4.4 billion hectares , more than The area of land with available trees (2.8 billion hectares) is about 1.6 billion hectares .
Of these 1.6 billion hectares, only about 0.9 billion hectares are unused by humans. This means that the total area that can support trees (and to absorb less CO2 and help humanity) is about 9 million square kilometers, about the size of the United States.
The area of land that can be used to plant trees on Earth is currently 4.4 billion hectares.
When the trees in these 9 million square kilometers are large enough, they will process 205 billion tons of carbon, about a quarter of the 300 billion tons of carbon humans have released into the environment since the Industrial Revolution until now.
According to Professor Thomas Crowther, co-author of the new study and founder of the Crowther Laboratory: “ We all know that planting trees can play an important role in limiting climate change. but we don’t know how big the impact might be. Our research clearly shows that afforestation is the best solution we have at the moment. But we have to hurry, because new forests will need several decades to mature, to reach the best carbon sequestration capacity .”
The scientific report was published by the research team in Science.