🌍 Fungi store more carbon than all the world's forests combined. And we've been destroying them.
The biggest carbon sink on the planet — and it's invisible.
A 2023 paper in Current Biology calculated that mycorrhizal fungi sequester an estimated 5 gigatons of carbon per year globally — roughly 36% of annual human CO₂ emissions.
Not the trees. Not the soil. The fungi attached to the roots.
They do this by creating glomalin — a sticky glycoprotein that binds carbon into soil aggregates, locking it away from the atmosphere for decades.
Here's the problem: modern industrial agriculture devastates mycorrhizal networks.
Tilling destroys physical hyphae. Phosphorus-heavy fertilisers tell plants they don't need fungal partners (fungi trade phosphorus for carbon — remove the need, remove the fungi). Fungicide use has tripled since 1990.
We've spent 70 years optimising food production while quietly dismantling the planet's primary carbon storage system.
Regenerative agriculture — minimal till, no synthetic phosphorus, cover crops — can rebuild mycorrhizal networks within 2–5 years.
The solution to climate change was underground this whole time.
We just weren't looking there.
Did you know fungi were this important to carbon storage? This genuinely surprised me when I first read the data. 🌱
#MycelNet #MyceliumCarbon #ClimateChange #RegenerativeAgriculture #Mycorrhizal #FungiScience #CarbonSink #Fungi #Mushroom
