The forest floor can absorb sufficient carbon in amounts that can literally clean the atmosphere.
How? Biomass is the short answer. How much do we need? How many forests are there? How many could there be? Do the custodians trim and prune the trees? More than likely you do not know of any at all.
However, if you live in the First World you have seen the professional tree trimmers that clean the power lines along highways, clean them of the overhanging and protruding branches. Just a simple line of trees along a power line. Next time notice the huge truck from which the tree trimmers operate and the wood chipper that they tow behind them. Stop along the roadside and watch for a few minutes and notice how much biomass is chipped and blown into the huge truck. All from trimming living trees without destroying them but actually improving their growth.
Now, imagine once more, if just one simple and sparse line of trees along a single power line will produce truck load after truck load of biomass, how much will a dense forest produce?
The production of biomass can be converted into biochar by using very simple technology that can be provided to every cottage industry agroforester who is growing merely one hectare of agroforest. It only takes two tons of residual-free biochar to spread one time over the one hectare forest floor to cover the ground sufficiently and produce sustainability of the project. The excess becomes the primary supply and can be used elsewhere for the many beneficial biochar projects aimed at mitigating global warming.
My high school chemistry class taught me that one gram of carbon has more surface area than a football field. A couple metric tons of biochar spread over a one hectare forest floor will create the same surface area as two million football fields. If we reforest 1.41 million hectares of forest and spread the forest floor with two metric tons per hectare of biochar we will have the CO2 absorbing surface area of the entire land mass of the Philippines which is just less than 30,000,000 hectares. (football field = approx. 473.8m2 or 21 football fields per hectare)
The advantage to producing biochar from the biomass of the forest is that it is clean. In this example the Philippines is .2% of the world's landmass so if we multiplied the 1.41 million hectares by 500 we need to reforest 700,000,000 hectares and cover the forest floor with clean biochar made from biomass trimmed from the forest. This example is only 5.36% of the landmass of Earth. Divided by 200 territories the project is merely 3.5 million hectares each.
Imagine once again, this time the equivalent of the entire land mass of Earth is covered with biochar that significantly absorbs the green house gas emissions from the atmosphere and sequesters them in the soil where the trees grow better as a result and place much of the carbon into their wood cells.
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