Back in 2019 NASA wrote an article, talking about planting trees as a way of doing part of the work for mitigating climate change. By looking at satellite images they looked at areas that were recently deforested, or areas which would be easily turned into forests. They came up with an incredible number of 900 million hectares (2.2 billion square acres). If all these areas were reforested with the right trees for each area. Apart from suddenly increasing the worlds forests, and giving breathing space for many species on the verge of extinction, the calculations suggest that these lands would take around half a trillion trees – it would increase forest cover by 25%.
Calculations suggest that the carbon that would be emitted would account for around 200 gigatons of carbon, or reducing carbon emissions in the atmosphere by around 25%. Now alarmingly, this is only around 20 years of current emissions, so it is not the only thing that we would have to do.
Even planting half a trillion trees is not an end of climate change – this is how much emissions we have emitted – but it would be a fantastic start.