The project is headed by The Carbon Community, a charity dedicated to creating forests and accelerating carbon removal, and aims to define a new reforestation approach to accelerate and enhance the sequestration of CO2 in trees and soil and improve biodiversity.
In May, more than 25,000 trees have been planted on 11 hectares just outside the Brecon Beacons in Wales. The project will assess the effects of using live soils from nearby forests to reintroduce microbes and organisms to increase tree survival rates as well as enhanced rock weathering (ERW) on carbon sequestration.
ERW takes crushed basalt, a by-product of quarrying, and applies it to the soil to capture CO2 and provide essential nutrients to fertilise trees and the fungi in the soil that support tree growth. It is a method that has been proven to be successful in sugar beet and pea crops.
Charles Nicholls, co-founder of The Carbon Community, said: “Reforestation is one of the most powerful tools we have to combat climate breakdown. The addition of crushed basalt releases nutrients into the soil and the chemical reactions that cause the rock particles to break down lock-in CO2, thereby removing it from the atmosphere.”
The study is being run in partnership with scientists from ETH Zürich Crowther Lab, Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation at the University of Sheffield, The Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, and The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.
Over the first two years, the project will measure the carbon stored in the trees and soil, and the results will identify the combination of treatments where the most carbon has been sequestered. The Carbon Community then aims to scale up this reforestation method to accelerate and enhance carbon removal from the atmosphere.
Marian Garfield, sustainability director at Hanson UK, commented: “Hanson is focused on climate protection and carbon reduction and enhancing biodiversity net gain are two of our key 2030 commitments."
