I just heard Paul Stamets say that soil is around 30% fungal mass, dead and alive, and that makes fungus the greatest repository of carbon in the biosphere. So to sequester a maximum amount of carbon maybe we should be optimizing for fungus rather than trees. Is a forest the best way to do that? Trees do have a lot of surface area for fungal growth. If so maybe we should be selecting kinds of trees to plant based on their fungal friendliness.
Some scientists are criticizing that the authors have maybe 2× overestimated.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/SimonLLewis/status/1147114505949855744" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SimonLLewis/status/1147114505949855744</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/pepcanadell/status/1147066574299377664" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/pepcanadell/status/1147066574299377664</a>
one important aspect in this is that forests have lower albedo than grassland. This means they absorb more solar radiation. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z</a>
You can take this a step further and just cut down trees, bury them in the ground and let new trees grow.<p>Do your part, and don't recycle paper, instead make sure to bury it. (I'm only sort of kidding.)
I've done this math before and it's not encouraging. Global carbon fuel burning is more than two cubic miles annually. A billion trees will capture about a trillion kgs of carbon over 10-20 years, but yearly we're burning about 4 trillion kgs of just crude oil.