Planting forests and other activities that harness the power of nature could play a major role in limiting global warming under the 2015 Paris agreement, an international study shows.
Natural climate solutions, also including protection of carbon-storing peat lands and better management of soils and grasslands, could account for 37 per cent of all actions needed by 2030 under the 195-nation Paris plan, it said.
Combined, the suggested "regreening of the planet" would be equivalent to halting all burning of oil worldwide, it said.
"Better stewardship of the land could have a bigger role in fighting climate change than previously thought," the international team of scientists said of findings published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The estimates for nature's potential, led by planting forests, were up to 30 per cent higher than those envisaged by a UN panel of climate scientists in a 2014 report, it said.
Trees soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide as they grow and release it when they burn or rot. That makes forests, from the Amazon to Siberia, vast natural stores of greenhouse gases.
Overall, better management of nature could avert 11.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year by 2030, the study said, equivalent to China's current carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use.
"If we are serious about climate change, then we are going to have to get serious about investing in nature," said Mark Terek, chief executive officer of The Nature Conservancy, which led the study.
