The effort to mitigate global warming requires removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is the idea of carbon capture.
Our planet has its own ways to capture carbon. The most efficient one is through vegetation. Living plants and trees capture CO2 from the atmosphere in vast amounts and store the carbon in their cells.
Forests are so efficient at capturing carbon that they are referred to as carbon sinks.
Oceans also capture carbon, and all organic matter is made of carbon-based molecules. CO2 enters the food chain through vegetation and as a result all living beings are part of the carbon cycle.
The carbon cycle is the balance of carbon sinks and carbon sources. Living organisms store carbon and dying organisms release it.
The ideal climate change mitigation would be to create an artificial carbon sink that is more efficient than forests. However it is hard to beat Nature.
There are projects to create carbon capture and storage technology, by extracting emissions from coal-fired plants, compressing them and storing them safely. They are still far from being a plausible and cost-effective reality.
Forests are Nature’s own effective mitigator of climate change.
The carbon capture rate changes during the lifetime of a tree. It increases steadily with age, until it reaches a plateau in old life. A tree never stops absorbing carbon while it is alive.
This would be perfect were it not for the fact that trees in fact release carbon when they die and the wood begins to decompose.
A managed forest must anticipate this and replace trees when they are past full maturity.
This way the carbon is safely stored away in the wood.