All of a sudden everyone’s talking about trees. Even Donald Trump wants trees. What’s going on?
The tree frenzy started slowly. In July 2019, researchers at the Institute of Integrative Biology at ETH-Zurich found that the restoration of forests was one of the most effective strategies for resolving the climate crisis. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, the scientists found that across the globe there is space for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of forest canopy cover. That’s enough land to plant close to a trillion trees. According to the ETH scientists, those trees could potentially sequester and store over 200 billion tonnes of carbon—which would make a significant contribution to eventually drawing down atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.
