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Global warming is the biggest threat of our time & trees are one of our natural weapons to capture carbon. What if they could help faster? We @living_carbon are excited to unveil that photosynthesis-enhanced trees can grow faster and capture more carbon. Here's how we did it 🧵
2/7 Today, a tree captures ~48lbs of CO2 per year. But they grow slowly and take up a lot of space. Today to plant 1T trees, we need 2-4x the entire area of the US. We hired a team of scientists to see how biotech could help.
3/7 Genetic engineering and gene editing methods like CRISPR/Cas-9 have helped develop dozens of new technologies, from medicines to American chestnut trees. We use genes from other plants to enable trees to recycle carbon into useful sugars for faster growth.
4/7 Over years of experimentation, we’ve studied thousands of trees in the greenhouse and field.
5/7 Today we are sharing new research that indicates photosynthesis enhanced trees grow faster and capture more carbon. Our trees accumulate up to 53% more biomass. We shared our research today via Science if you want the full paper. www.livingcarbon.com/post/photosynthesis-enhanced-trees-grow-faster-and-capture-more-carbon
6/7 If you want the tl;dr, we only need to plant 3.3B enhanced trees on 11M acres and remove 1Gt of carbon. These trees can quite literally help save the planet.
7/7 Our trees' ability to capture carbon depends on their distribution. We're working with landowners today on pilot planting projects. If you'd like to help fight climate change by planting some of these trees, learn more at: www.livingcarbon.com/
if you want to plant trees, get on the waitlist here www.livingcarbon.com/seedling-waitlist
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