Chestnut trees could temper climate change.

• Position: Global Warming - Brief article

Introducing a new hybrid of the American chestnut tree not only would bring back the all-but-extinct species, but put a dent in the amount of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere, maintains researcher Douglass Jacobs in the journal, Forest Ecology and Management. He found that American chestnuts grow much faster than other hardwood species, allowing them to sequester more carbon over the same period of growth--and since American chestnut trees more often are used for high-quality hardwood products such as furniture, they hold the carbon longer than wood used for paper and other low-grade materials.

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"Maintaining or increasing forest cover has been identified as an important way to slow climate change," he indicates. "The American chestnut is an incredibly fast-growing tree. Generally, the faster a tree grows, the more carbon it is able to sequester and, when these trees are harvested and processed, the carbon can be...