By Bru Pearce | Envisionation Ltd
Part of a series exploring the science behind large-scale biosphere restoration and the future of our living planet.
Introduction
We talk about carbon constantly. Carbon footprints, carbon markets, carbon targets. But here is something most climate conversations miss entirely: not all carbon is the same. Understanding the difference could change everything about how we approach the climate crisis — and points towards the most powerful climate intervention available to us: restoring the living biosphere.
The Living Carbon Account: Biomass and Biodiversity
There are currently around 550 billion tons of living carbon on Earth. That sounds enormous, but it represents more than a 50% reduction from what existed before the rise of human civilisation — roughly 1,100 billion tons on a healthy planet. We have quietly halved the amount of life on Earth, and most people have no idea.
That missing living carbon matters enormously — not just for what we call biodiversity, but for climate stability. But we need to be precise about something critical: it is not enough simply to preserve species. What matters for the functioning of natural systems is biomass — the actual number and weight of living organisms at population scale. A species reduced to five percent of its historic population is practically irrelevant to nutrient cycling, even if it technically still exists. Once a population has declined by thirty percent or more, its functional contribution is already seriously degraded.
Consider seabirds. Their historic guano production supported entire industries and delivered critical nutrients to ocean surface waters. As seabird populations have crashed, that nutrient delivery has all but disappeared. Biodiversity and biomass must go hand in hand. We need not just the species, but the populations — at the scale at which they can do their ecological work.
Flora and fauna have co-evolved over hundreds of millions of years as essential partners. An apple tree grows an apple so that animals will eat it and disperse its seeds. Flowers are bright and sweet so that bees will feed — and in doing so, carry pollen from plant to plant. Animals are not merely passengers in the biosphere. They are co-architects of it. And though animal biomass — roughly 2 billion tons of carbon compared to 450 billion tons in plants — is tiny in relative terms, its functional importance is absolutely critical.
Five Types of Carbon
Active photosynthetic carbon is the real engine: the carbon in leaves and phytoplankton, actively capturing solar energy and drawing CO₂ from the atmosphere. Fungi play a vital supporting role — not as photosynthesisers, but as nutrient mobilisers, breaking down organic matter and releasing minerals that plants need to grow. Together they form the core of the biosphere’s climate management system.
Fauna carbon — the carbon in animals — is small in weight but enormous in function. Fauna are the connective tissue of the living planet, driving the global nutrient cycles that enable photosynthesis to occur at scale. Whales dive deep, feed, and defecate at the surface, delivering essential nutrients to phytoplankton. Salmon carry ocean nutrients inland; bears distribute them through forests; rain and rivers return them to the sea. Seabirds feed in the ocean and deposit nutrients on land. These are not separate systems — fauna connect ocean and land into one integrated global nutrient cycle. Human impacts have reduced these natural nutrient flows by 70–90%.
Structural carbon is locked in wood, trunks, and roots — the physical architecture of forests. Metabolically quiet but critically important as a carbon store. Think of it as cupboard space for carbon — currently more than half empty. Filling these cupboards means drawing carbon directly from the atmosphere.
Medium-term sequestered carbon is stored in permafrost, peat, and organic soils over ice-age timescales. This is the dangerous carbon. As the planet warms and permafrost thaws, it is being released — including as methane, a greenhouse gas roughly eighty times more potent than CO₂ over twenty years. This is not a distant risk; it is happening now and represents one of the most serious feedback loops in the climate system.
Long-term sequestered carbon is the deep geological store — coal, oil, and gas formed over hundreds of millions of years. When we burn it, we reintroduce it to the active biosphere on timescales vastly shorter than those over which it accumulated.
The Ocean: The Underappreciated Climate Engine
Most people picture forests when they think of carbon capture. But the oceans cover 70% of the planet’s surface, and their phytoplankton are extraordinarily productive. Despite marine biomass being far smaller than terrestrial biomass in raw weight, primary productivity — the actual rate of carbon fixation through photosynthesis — is broadly equivalent between land and ocean. Phytoplankton photosynthesis occurs down to sixty or eighty metres depth across the world’s oceans — an enormous three-dimensional volume of photosynthetic activity. The ocean’s climate significance is far greater than raw biomass figures suggest.
The marine carbon cycle is also the fastest. Phytoplankton grow and die rapidly. Zooplankton consume them and carry carbon deep into the ocean as marine snow. The whales that once populated our oceans in vast numbers were central to this engine — their collapse through centuries of commercial whaling has severely degraded the ocean’s nutrient cycling capacity. It was not fishing boats alone that caused the collapse of the great cod stocks; it was the reduction in phytoplankton resulting from a shortage of whale-delivered nutrients that broke the food chain that fed the cod.
The Hidden Climate Layer: The Ocean’s Skin
There is a remarkable and largely overlooked mechanism at the ocean’s surface: the Sea Surface Microlayer, or SML. This film, just micrometres thick and covering 71% of the planet, is enriched with lipids and surfactants released by phytoplankton and zooplankton. It is actively managed by living organisms, which regulate evaporation, heat transfer, and cloud formation.
As marine plankton have declined by 50% since the 1950s — continuing at roughly 1% per year — this living control mechanism is failing. Research by Howard Dryden and Diane Duncan shows that lipophilic toxic chemicals, microplastics, and black carbon concentrate in the SML and are directly toxic to the organisms that maintain it. Water vapour accounts for approximately 75% of total greenhouse forcing. The living film on our ocean surface is a primary regulator of that forcing — one that current climate models have not fully incorporated.
Life as a Climate Management System: The Biotic Pump
Forests and phytoplankton do not just capture carbon. They actively drive the planet’s water cycle through a mechanism known as the biotic pump, developed by atmospheric physicist Anastassia Makarieva and the late Victor Gorshkov, and experimentally validated by Peter Bunyard.
Forests transpire vast quantities of water vapour. As it rises and condenses, it creates a pressure drop that draws moist air inland from the ocean — sustaining rainfall far into continental interiors. Without intact forest, this pump breaks down: soils lose moisture, drought risk rises, and the risk of permanent desertification increases. Makarieva’s recent analysis links the dramatic global temperature anomaly of 2023 not primarily to CO₂ increases, but to disruption of cloud cover over degraded ecosystems in the Amazon, Congo, and Canada.
Plants open and close their stomata to control evaporation and cooling. Fungi release spores that seed cloud formation. Marine microorganisms load sea spray with organic matter and dimethyl sulphide to regulate cloud formation and solar reflection. The entire biosphere appears entangled like a living neural network — and we have crippled it.
The Restoration Opportunity
If we restore the missing 550 billion tons of living carbon — bringing forests, grasslands, soils, and marine ecosystems back towards their pre-civilisation state — that carbon must come from somewhere. It comes from the atmosphere. The mathematics are clear: re-growing Earth’s biomass to 1,100 Gt draws down approximately 258 ppm of CO₂, equivalent to 550 Gt C — the largest single contribution to the 639 Gt C total drawdown required to return atmospheric CO₂ to 300 ppm.
These figures account for ocean off-gassing as CO₂ partial pressures rebalance, and still leave meaningful headroom for unavoidable emissions during our energy transition. And with double the life on the planet, photosynthetic activity would also roughly double — strengthening the natural carbon sink and giving the biosphere the capacity to absorb emissions we cannot yet eliminate.
This is not about planting a few trees. It is about recognising that life itself is the climate system, and that restoring the biosphere in its full functional complexity — fauna, fungi, soil microbiota, forests, and oceans — is the most powerful climate intervention available to us.
The Envisionation Biosphere Restoration Plan
The ideas in this article are developed in depth in the Envisionation Biosphere Restoration Plan, produced by Bru Pearce of Envisionation Ltd. The plan provides a practical framework for large-scale restoration of land and ocean ecosystems as the foundation for a stable climate — a world where nine billion people can live well by 2050. It recognises that restoring living carbon in its full functional complexity is not a supplementary climate action. It is the primary one.
Learn more about the Biosphere Restoration Plan
Key sources: Bar-On, Phillips & Milo (2018), The Biomass Distribution on Earth, PNAS; Dryden & Duncan (2022), Climate Disruption Caused by a Decline in Marine Biodiversity and Pollution, IJECC; Makarieva & Gorshkov (2007), Biotic Pump of Atmospheric Moisture as Driver of the Hydrological Cycle on Land, HESS; Bunyard et al., In Defence of the Biotic Pump, Journal of Atmospheric Science Research; Envisionation Biosphere Restoration Plan v4, Jan 2026.
