Planethopia

Give tropical forests back to the people who live in them – and the trees will soak up your carbon for you. Above all, keep the forests out of the hands of government. So concludes a study that has tracked the fate of 80 forests worldwide over 15 years. Most tropical forests – from Himalayan hill forests to the Madagascan jungle – are controlled by local and national governments. Forest communities own and manage little more than a tenth. They have a reputation for trashing their trees – cutting them for timber or burning them to clear land for farming.

In reality the opposite is true, according to Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the first study of its kind, Chhatre and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor compared forest ownership with data on carbon sequestration which is estimated from the size and number of trees in a forest.