Wood burial, also called wood vaulting or biomass burial, could potentially store more than 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year and decrease global warming by more than a third of a degree Celsius (more than half a degree Fahrenheit), according to a recent study in Nature Geoscience. This difference sounds small, but preventing a few tenths of a degree of warming could keep polar ice caps from completely disintegrating, coral reefs from collapsing and other tipping points from triggering.

“Every year, terrestrial plants alone capture six times as much carbon as our fossil fuel emissions,” says Ning Zeng, a University of Maryland climate scientist, who has been a leader in the field of biomass burial for two decades and was not involved in the new research. “But pretty much all of that goes back into the atmosphere as leaves fall and trees die and decay.” If carbon dioxide is buried under just a few yards of dirt—where bacteria no longer have the oxygen they need to break down woody tissues—however, none or very little of it is released.

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