Climate Change

[Alan V]

(TED Talk)

That was a fascinating lecture.

TL;DR:  The only way to restore desertified grasslands, and to use them for carbon sequestration to help climate change, is by restoring the conditions under which they evolved.  That means large herds of grazing animals rotating through the landscapes.  The herds fertilize the lands, but the main reason this works is that without the herds reducing the growth of grasses, they dry out during the dry seasons and prevent younger plants from growing during the wet seasons, thus leading to the loss of the grasses. This seemingly counter-intuitive method has been demonstrated to work again and again.

So land management is a key component for fighting climate change.  That includes stopping desertification and deforestation, and promoting reforestation as well as using smarter agricultural methods to sequester carbon.  However, I doubt such methods could stop climate change all by themselves, as the speaker implied, but could only work along with a wide number of other strategies.