You probably don’t think fungi are very important to climate change. They just eat dead things, right? Ignoring the fact that that is. . . important, it turns out that fungi also play a role in sequestering carbon in the soil and human meddling has endangered that.
Fungi doesn’t work alone. It has a symbiotic relationship with certain plants and the end result is that it allows those plants to pull more carbon. So without this relationship, the amount of carbon sequestered is less than it would have been otherwise.
Human led changes to plants and habitats has caused these bonds to be broken. Although both the plant and the fungus continue to live on, they are not working together to pull carbon. Researchers are hopeful that future policy will take their findings into account.