Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction

by Mark Maslin

In 2019 researchers claimed in the journal Science that covering 900m hectares of land—roughly the size of the continental US—with 1 trillion trees could store up to 205 billion tonnes of carbon, about two-thirds of the carbon that humans have already put into the atmosphere. The ‘1 trillion trees’ mantra has caught the popular imagination and even President Trump declared at the Davos meeting that this was a good idea. The only problem is that the research that produced this high carbon number was fundamentally flawed and in fact the IPCC and other studies suggest that new forests could store on average an extra 57 billion tonnes of carbon by the end of the century.