Allowing the Earth’s forests to recover could cancel out the majority of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to new research.
The worldwide assessment of current and potential forestation using satellite imagery appears Thursday in the journal Science. It shows that letting saplings regrow on land where forests have been cleared would increase global forested area by one-third and remove 205 billion metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere. That’s two thirds of the roughly 300 billion metric tons of carbon humans have put up there since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
The findings show forest restoration could be …