– The best way to keep climate change in check is by replanting trees on destroyed forest areas the size of the United States, scientists said on Thursday, as doing so would capture two-thirds of man-made planet-warming emissions.
“Every other climate change solution requires that we all change our behavior, or we need some top-down decision from a politician who may or may not believe in climate change, or it’s a scientific discovery we don’t yet have,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Crowther Lab scientists on Thursday published what they said was the first study looking at how many trees the world can support, where they could be grown, and how much carbon they could store.
The tropics lost 12 million hectares of tree cover in 2018 – much due to fires, land-clearing for farming and mining – the fourth-highest annual loss since records began in 2001, according to monitoring service Global Forest Watch.