IS IT POSSIBLE TO CAPTURE CO2?

Yes. Nature is doing it all the time and is our best ally in the battle against climate change. Around half of all CO2 emissions are captured by natural means—by the oceans and plants of the world. However that means the more we damage the oceans and the more trees we cut down, the less nature can help us. Plants store about 30% of all the CO2 we emit, and the best way to take advantage of that is reforestation. “If we would plant about 3 million square miles of forest, we’d be able to reduce the Earth’s temperature by about a third of a degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century,” says Julia Pongratz, a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s department of global ecology. The problem: Not enough land is available to plant 3 million square miles of forest. Researchers hope that we can improve farming methods enough to make more farmland available for growing forests.