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The climate change news beat is usually void of any uplifting stories, but a recent study by scientists in the UK offered a rare bit of positive news. It turns out that cities, typically considered to be carbon-spewers rather than carbon-absorbers, can actually store quite a bit of the stuff.
Conservation scientists from the University of Kent found out that the mid-sized city of Leicester stores ten times as much carbon as earlier calculated, about 231,000 tons. That’s equivalent to the combined annual emissions of 150,000 sedans. Leicester could further expand its capacity to store carbon by planting more trees. Currently most of Leicester’s publicly owned land is covered in grass, but transitioning that land to just 10 percent tree coverage would amp up the city’s carbon storage by 12 percent.