Promises by countries, including the UK, to plant trees to combat climate change would require an area larger than the USA.
An assessment of the national climate plans submitted by nearly 200 nations to the UN found they would require a total of 1.2bn hectares of land for “nature-based carbon removal activities”, such as tree planting.
The report, compiled by researchers led by the University of Melbourne’s Climate Futures initiative, said the plans would be slow to implement. Kate Dooley, the lead author, added that tree planting was being used instead of doing “the hard work of steeply reducing emissions from fossil fuels, decarbonising food systems and stopping the destruction of forests and other ecosystems”.
