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Forests play a larger role in Earth’s climate system than previously suspected for both the risks from deforestation and the potential gains from regrowth, a benchmark study released Thursday has shown.

The study, published in Science, provides the most accurate measure so far of the amount of greenhouse gases absorbed from the atmosphere by tropical, temperate and boreal forests, researchers said.

“This is the first complete and global evidence of the overwhelming role of forests in removing anthropogenic carbon dioxide,” said co-author Josep Canadell, a scientist at CSIRO, Australia’s national climate research centre in Canberra.

“If you were to stop deforestation tomorrow, the world’s established and regrowing forests would remove half of fossil fuel emissions,” he told AFP, describing the findings as both “incredible” and “unexpected”.

Wooded areas across the planet soak up fully a third of the fossil fuels released into the atmosphere each year, some 2.4 billion tonnes of carbon, the study found.

At the same time, the ongoing and barely constrained destruction of forests — mainly in the tropics — for food, fuel and development was shown to emit 2.9 billion tonnes of carbon annually, more than a quarter of all emissions stemming from human activity.