Saving the forests won’t be enough to stop climate change — we need substantial emission cuts
Increasingly, companies are releasing new net-zero goals to neutralize their greenhouse gas emissions in the future. And instead of substantially reducing their carbon emissions, a lot of those pledges rely on using a technique called forest carbon capture.
But a new study reinforces what scientists have been saying for a while: counting on trees to do the dirty work of removing the CO2 we have put on the atmosphere won’t be enough to stop climate change.
A paper published today in Science posits that, if we stop all human management on forests (for example, wood harvesting) under current climatic conditions and with the CO2 concentration that already exists, their aboveground biomass could increase by up to 44.1 gigatons of carbon.
If...