Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

We call on the restoration community, forestry experts and policymakers to prioritize the regeneration of natural forests over other types of tree planting — by allowing disturbed lands to recover to their previous high-carbon state. Giving the same area exclusively to plantations would sequester just 1 Pg C or, if used only for agroforestry, 7 Pg C. Furthermore, we find, on average, that natural forests are 6 times better than agroforestry and 40 times better than plantations at storing carbon (sequestering 12, 1.9 and 0.3 Pg C per 100 Mha by 2100, respectively; see Supplementary Information, Table S6). So under current schemes, natural forests can get us most of the way to the median estimate for forest uptake used in the IPCC’s pathways for keeping warming under 1.5 °C, 57 Pg C. (Our storage figure is lower because of more-optimistic assessments of tree growth and the area planted in some model runs2.)

Source: www.nature.com