Environmenthttps : / / www . theguardian . com / commentisfree / 2019 / jul / 05 / the - guardian - view - on - the - climate - emergency - forests - can - help - to - save - usThere is so much bad news about the climate emergency that it is easy to sink into a heatstruck daze and suppose that we can do nothing to prevent catastrophic global change over the next 50 years . This would be a mistake . There are still things to be done which will diminish future damage and – more hopefully still – undo the effects of some of our past crimes against the environment . Research has just shown that there is far more land in the world on which trees can be planted than anyone had supposed . This matters . There is no doubt that reforestation must form part of any strategy to diminish the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide , and so avert the kind of temperature rise that will cause a civilisational breakdown as the seas rise and the deserts spread on land . The new estimates show that with a truly heroic effort , it would be possible to plant or allow to regrow enough trees around the world to remove from the atmosphere two - thirds of the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities . The figures involved are boggling : a trillion trees , covering in total an area as large as the US and China combined . The total cost is estimated at $ 300 bn , a figure to make even a Bezos blink . But the prize is almost beyond price . Without the sequestration of carbon the world will bust through 1 . 5 C of warming and head for much worse . Planting trees is by far the least expensive and most practicable way available at present to do this . It won ’ t be enough , of course . Important – vital – as these efforts are to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere , and undo some of the damage we have done in the last century , they will be wholly inadequate without a corresponding effort to stop the production of more greenhouse gases . Here the signs remain extremely gloomy . The time for change was yesterday . A study published in Nature this week shows that the power plants already built , under construction or planned will all by themselves consume enough fossil fuels and emit enough carbon to break the 1 . 5 C barrier and probably the 2 C one as well . Any serious attempt to stabilise the climate even at that uncomfortable level must start with a commitment to plan no more power stations that run on fossil fuels , and to lower drastically the number of planned ones that are actually built . When measured against the size of the challenge , even a reforestation plan on this scale does not appear ambitious . But it is , in political and economic terms , especially when measured against the willingness up to now of politicians and consumers to do what they must . The most obvious obstacle is the raging pace of deforestation in the world today , especially in the tropics . Last year was the third worst since proper records from satellite images began in 2002 ; and unlike the two worse ones , the damage recorded in 2018 was all done directly by humans , rather than by fires . Although the government of Indonesia , previously one of the worst offenders , has managed to reduce the amount of land being lost to palm oil plantations , the real problem lies in Brazil , where the land is cleared , often in a very wasteful way , for soya beans and pasture – both used for meat production – and the populist rightwing Bolsonaro government appears to be deliberately accelerating the pace of forest destruction . Reforestation and the preservation of existing forests is also a marker of the way in which the green movement is not just about economics . It must also speak to our spiritual sides if it is to mobilise a global coalition . Trees , and still more forests , do not just remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere . They seem to suck some of the darkness and self - obsession out of the humans in their shade . They remind us that we share the earth with life forms older than we can imagine and stranger than we can ever understand , and that we ’ re bound to them in webs of mutual interdependence . Preserving and restoring the great forests would be worth doing for itself even if it had no economic use . But the climate emergency means that this plan is also a precondition if the next century is to have much more than a subsistence economy . Main ideaPlanting trees can help prevent climate change . SummaryPlanting trees can help prevent climate change . Research shows that reforestation is the cheapest and most practical way to remove the greenhouse gases . Reforestation also helps us realize we share the earth with other creatures and are mutually interdependent with them . However , these efforts must come along with a corresponding effort to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by reducing fossil - fuel power plants and slowing down deforestation . Wordsdaze 멍 때 림 / 멍 하 게 하 다 , 현혹 시키 다 undo 되돌리 다 , 망치 다 , 풀 다 boggling 놀라 게 하 는 , ( boggle 놀라 서 멈칫 하 다 ) sequestration 가압류 , 몰수 bust 파산 하 다 , 부서지 다 / 흉상 mutual interdependence 상호 의 존성 subsistence economy 자급 경제