It’s not all bad but we need much more collaborative action and quickly. The most obvious answer is to stop burning carbonaceous materials. This isn’t an easy answer given our investment in combustion engines, industrial processes and the need for domestic warmth and cooling. Making more land available for agriculture typically involves clearing forests or draining swamps with both approaches liberating carbon dioxide and reducing carbon sequestering capability, all of which needs to be tackled.
As well as investment in renewable energy infrastructure, electric vehicles and growing efforts to reduce energy consumption eg better building insulation there is growing interest in carbon sequestration.
Planting forests has received a lot of attention towards the end of 2019 with politicians trying to out do each other with every greater tree planting promises in the run up to the UK’s general election in December 2019. However, for carbon offsetting it’s a slow business. The Woodland Trust show that mixed woodland can store 400 tons of carbon per hectare at maturity. If maturity takes 100 years that is equivalent to 4t/hectare per year or 8t/hectare per year if maturity arrives after 50 years. So tree planting will have its place, an important one, but it cannot be our saviour on its own.
The world is finally taking carbon sequestration seriously together with efforts to reduce hydrocarbon consumption and generally decarbonise the economy. We have though a very long way to go. The UK produced ~354Mt of carbon dioxide in 2019, that is equivalent to ~98Mt of carbon. The task is enormous, but the solutions do/can exist: