People are working on it.
Anyway all policy scenarios with any hope of staying below 2ºC, let alone 1.5ºC, include a lot of net reforestation. So we’ll have to turn this around, somewhere.
It seems like people are working on it in various places, especially in the Amazon:
Did you sort this out?
Did you ever find an answer to this re: reforestation projects? Could be useful to relocate termites in order to introduce the microbes to grasslands.
You should have plenty of space if you can plant in the park! Public fruit trees are a great community service, and if you tell the park people that you want to plant native trees, they'd be foolish to say no. More fruit for you, more fruit for the birds, more fruit for anyone smart enough to harvest it, less grass and prickly stuff, more shade in the heat of summer. Everyone wins. Including the people at the persimmon nursery. :)
Projects like this are in desperate need of serious people to help them scale up. If even a small fraction of the people who see articles like this (or videos, or whatever) were to contribute some of their time and energy to the projects themselves, then the odds wouldn't be so against them, and that little bit of progress would become reforestation of entire regions. The question isn't whether it's possible for a project like this to succeed; the question is whether there are enough people willing to make it happen.
https://worldfloraonline.org/ is useful for verifying plant names and finding botanical descriptions.
There's never enough space! Have you looked into nearby lands where you could guerrilla plant some things? At least you got some pawpaws planted already. That's probably the most important thing.
As others have said, this article is not very accurate. Annual crops produce over a short window, so one would need to have successive crops lined up in order to keep the space productive. Growing something to get only one harvest is a very poor return on investment. If one wants to survive without depending on "the system" at all, then trying to do so outside of the equatorial zone is living life on hard mode.
Near the equator, one could survive on only bananas for a while, and that would take a small fraction of a hectare, probably about as much space as this article talks about, but realistically, eating only banana long-term is not feasible, and growing more variety requires more space. There is also the feast-or-famine issue if the gaps between harvests are too long. Preservation of the harvest is time-consuming and requires infrastructure that not everyone has (e.g. refrigeration). Living in a neighbourhood where everyone is growing food in order to survive would allow for trade, and so each individual/household would not need to diversify their food production as much, and someone's excess that they cannot preserve could fill someone else's harvest gap, reducing the total amount of land that each requires. Ideally, that's the way to do it, and some people are trying. Tree fruits make the most sense as staple foods, since they become self-maintaining after a few years (other than pruning to control size), and in a sufficiently diverse food forest ecosystem, the trees won't deplete the soil or invite plagues, so they don't require externally-produced fertilisers and -icides. With enough different species and a fairly non-seasonal climate, it's possible to grow enough fruit year-round, with some high-calorie staple(s) always in season.
But lettuce and lima beans? Good luck with that.
I remember reading a few years back that about half of the total world production of palm oil goes to "livestock" feed, but I cannot find the source now.
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Let us not forget that this is primarily due to deforestation, whether directly (due to loss of tree cover for moisture retention) or indirectly (due to climate change).