To fight wildfires and climate change, scientists say: Don’t burn debris, bury it.

Per Anthropocene Magazine, new research suggests a simple fix for both wildfires and climate change: bury the debris from forest thinning instead of burning it. The study, published in Science Advances, found that burying wood waste in a specially designed landfill could trap about seventy-eight percent of its carbon, compared to just four and a half percent when burned. The financial math also favors burial—if carbon credits sell for one hundred dollars per metric ton, burying could earn around two billion dollars while storing sixty million tons of carbon dioxide. But the researchers caution that soil conditions matter, and in the wrong ground, digging a burial pit could release more carbon than the wood would ever store. Still, they say there are promising opportunities everywhere.

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