Almost 600 media outlets ( including Vox) ran stories about the study in 2019, according to Carbon Brief. The authors of the Science paper originally argued that restoring trees is “our most effective climate change solution to date” and said there’s “room” for 900 million hectares (2.2 billion acres) of new trees across the world. Others highlight a highly controversial study that appeared in Science in 2019 and inspired the WEF’s trillion tree campaign. Some scientists point to the 2011 Bonn Challenge, which set an initial goal of restoring 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested land globally by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030. It is hard to identify the exact moment when we became obsessed with planting trees. So have global drives: Today, there are no fewer than three campaigns focused on planting 1 trillion trees, including the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) One Trillion Trees Initiative, which launched in 2020. In the past three decades, the number of tree-planting organizations has skyrocketed, growing nearly threefold in the tropics alone.
Asim Hafeez/Bloomberg via Getty Images The push to plant a trillion trees Instead of focusing on planting huge numbers of trees, experts told Vox, we should focus on growing trees for the long haul, protecting and restoring ecosystems beyond just forests, and empowering the local communities that are best positioned to care for them. Often, the allure of bold targets obscures the challenges involved in seeing them through, and the underlying forces that destroy ecosystems in the first place. The study is among the most comprehensive analyses of restoration projects to date, but it’s just one example in a litany of failed campaigns that call into question the value of big tree-planting initiatives. The authors found “no evidence” that planting offered substantial climate benefits or supported the livelihoods of local communities. In one recent study in the journal Nature, for example, researchers examined long-term restoration efforts in northern India, a country that has invested huge amounts of money into planting over the last 50 years. Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday. Vox’s German Lopez is here to guide you through the Biden administration’s burst of policymaking. There’s just one problem: These campaigns often don’t work, and sometimes they can even fuel deforestation. Really, what’s not to like about trees? They suck up carbon emissions naturally while providing resources for wildlife and humans - and they’re even nice to look at. Companies and billionaires love these kinds of initiatives. In the past two decades, mass tree-planting campaigns like this one have gained popularity as a salve for many of our modern woes, from climate change to the extinction crisis. Seedlings of the peroba rosa tree at a nursery in Aimorés, Brazil. The trees were planted at the wrong time and there wasn’t enough rainfall to support the saplings, the head of the country’s agriculture and forestry trade union told the paper. Less than three months later, up to 90 percent of the saplings were dead, the Guardian reported. “By planting millions of young trees, the nation is working to foster a new, lush green Turkey,” Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said when he kicked off the project in Ankara.
In one northern city, the tree-planting campaign set the Guinness World Record for the most saplings planted in one hour in a single location: 303,150. On November 11, 2019, volunteers planted 11 million trees in Turkey as part of a government-backed initiative called Breath for the Future.
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