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The Paris Agreement calls on us to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. To reach this goal, we need to reduce CO₂ emissions and remove existing CO₂ from the atmosphere.

A team led by LMU scientists Yiannis Moustakis and Julia Pongratz has now demonstrated that large-scale afforestation/reforestation (AR) can make an important contribution to such efforts. Simulations by the researchers show that AR could reduce peak and end-of-century temperatures and shorten the period during which global temperature exceeds the 1.5-degree target, as they report in the journal Nature Communications.

AR is currently the most frequently deployed method of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "Overall, the international community has already announced ambitious AR goals of up to 490 million hectares by 2060, and this figure is likely to increase even further as more countries present their long-term plans. We wanted to find out how strongly these measures can influence the climate," says Moustakis.

"Investigating their effects in detail requires the use of cutting-edge models which can represent an interactive carbon cycle that takes into account various processes and feedback."

Modeling with more than 1,200 scenarios

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