One of the biggest limits to plant growth is a scarcity of the nutrient phosphorus. One of the things that mycorrhizal fungi do best – one of their most prominent metabolic ‘songs’ – is to mine phosphorus from the soil and transfer it to their plant partners. If plants are fertilised with phosphorus, they grow more. The more plants grow, the more they draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The more plants live, the more plants die, and the more carbon is buried in soils and sediments. The more carbon that is buried, the less there is in the atmosphere.
