You can protect land for habitat, and you can preserve existing stores of carbon, but any notions about nature being a carbon sink capable of offsetting fossil fuel use are best discarded. Take a look at UK energy consumption (it's mainly gas and oil these days, with most coal phased out):
The only carbon solution is figuring out how to not need fossil fuels for energy, because there's absolutely no way biological photosynthesis can make more than a tiny dent in that figure.
I'd also look at Canada's abject failure on the 'natural carbon sink' front. Their idea was that Canada's pine forests would somehow serve as an offset for Alberta tar sands fossil carbon emissions (among the highest in the world, as they use gas to melt the tar to process it into syncrude for refineries). Climate change however increased temperatures, leading to pine beetle outbreaks and fires, and those forests became net atmospheric carbon sources, not sinks:
While I agree that natural forests are unlikely to make a significant dent in CO2 through biological photosynthesis, that is not necessarily true for all plants. Kelp and Bamboo farming can do quite a lot more than the average tree with their extremely high growth rates. Just need to figure out what to do with the resulting product. Source: I'm in a working group looking at circular economies with net CO2 loss per cycle, using kelp for fuel and plastic production, scalable to Gigatonne levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/...
The only carbon solution is figuring out how to not need fossil fuels for energy, because there's absolutely no way biological photosynthesis can make more than a tiny dent in that figure.
I'd also look at Canada's abject failure on the 'natural carbon sink' front. Their idea was that Canada's pine forests would somehow serve as an offset for Alberta tar sands fossil carbon emissions (among the highest in the world, as they use gas to melt the tar to process it into syncrude for refineries). Climate change however increased temperatures, leading to pine beetle outbreaks and fires, and those forests became net atmospheric carbon sources, not sinks:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/beetles-t...