ETH Zurich has published a study in the journal Science that shows this would be the most effective method to combat climate change.
The Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich investigates nature-based solutions to climate change. In their latest study, the researchers showed for the first time where in the world new trees could grow and how much carbon they would store.
Study lead author and postdoc at the Crowther Lab Jean-François Bastin explains: “One aspect was of particular importance to us as we did the calculations: we excluded cities or agricultural areas from the total restoration potential as these areas are needed for human life.”
The researchers calculated that under the current climate conditions, Earth’s land could support 4.4 billion hectares of continuous tree cover. That is 1.6 billion more than the currently existing 2.8 billion hectares. Of these 1.6 billion hectares, 0.9 billion hectares fulfill the criterion of not being used by humans. This means that there is currently an area of the size of the US available for tree restoration. Once mature, these new forests could store 205 billion tonnes of carbon: about two thirds of the 300 billion tonnes of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution.
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life, and of course in subsequent centuries we had exactly the opposite. The science of life was subsumed under mechanics and we had a mechanistic view of the human organism and nature."
A Quest for the Nature and Origin of Life - Fritjof Capra…
ld be simpler than humans genetically. Plus, amoebas date back
farther in time than humans, and simplicity is considered an attribute
of primitive beings. It just didn’t make sense. The idea of directionality
in nature, a gradient from simple to complex, began with the Greeks,
who called nature physis, meaning growth. That idea subtly extended
from changes over an organism’s lifetime, to changes over evolutionary
time after Charles Darwin argued that all animals descend from a single
common ancestor. When his contemporaries drew evolutionary trees of
life, they assumed increasing complexity. Worms originated early in
animal evolution. Creatures with more complex structures originated
later. Biologists tweaked evolutionary trees over the following century,
but generally, simple organisms continued to precede the complex.
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