The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World?’

Episode Date: August 21, 2022

In the past decade, planting trees has come to represent many things: a virtuous act, a practical solution and a symbol of hope in the face of climate change. But can planting a trillion trees really save the world?Visiting the Eden Reforestation Projects in Goiás, Brazil, and interviewing numerous international scientists and activists, the journalist Zach St. George offers a vivid insight into the root of the tree-planting movement — from the Green Belt Movement of the 1970s to the Trillion Tree Campaign of the 2010s — and considers the concept’s environmental potential, as well as the movement’s shortcomings.This story was written by Zach St. George and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Every time you participate in our economy by, say, ordering some CBD oil or a yoga mat or a wood-burning pizza oven, you might feel a bit guilty about the carbon footprint of your purchases. At the same time, few of us want to become ascetics who never drive or buy things. We don't want to make the tough choices that would actually reduce our individual impact on the planet. But what if there was a way to have both? Would you feel better knowing that for every item you buy, someone somewhere in the world plants a tree? Many organizations and large corporations like Nestle, Shell Oil, and Amazon think you would. And that's why they're participating in the global movement to plant a trillion new trees. My name is Zach St. George.

I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. I cover conservation and climate change. If you Google, quote, plant a tree, you'll see a bunch of search results for groups offering to put a tree in the ground for you in return for donations or as a result of something you bought. And this is a pretty inexpensive thing for them to do. A tree can be planted for as little as, say, 10 cents. But the organizations and companies that plant the trees tend to be pretty opaque. One researcher I talked with found that the number of trees these organizations have claimed to have planted has increased by nearly 5,000% since the 1990s. But there's no way to know if that's true.

Everything is self-reported. Even if they've planted as many trees as they say, that might not mean much. While these organizations talk a lot about how many trees they've planted as many trees as they say, that might not mean much. While these organizations talk a lot about how many trees they've planted, they tend not to talk about how many of those trees are still alive. For a really long time, and across different cultures around the world, the act of planting a tree has been symbolic, a kind of gesture of goodwill towards people in the future. The modern global movement to plant trees really took off in 2011. That year, a German 13-year-old

named Felix Finkbeiner gave a speech to the United Nations, and he proposed that we should plant a trillion trees. Subsequently, scientists connected to Finkbeiner came out with a series of influential papers quantifying the existing number of trees on earth, how many more trees could fit, and also how much carbon those trees could hold. The scientists concluded that restoring forests was one of the best ways to combat climate change. What a lot of people heard was, we need to fill the world with trees. But there are some major problems with that idea. For one, where will the trees go? Can you really fit that many trees on earth in places where there aren't already existing intact ecosystems? And then there's the

bigger question. Is this really a good way to deal with climate change? To get an idea of how these trees actually get in the ground, I flew to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. I rented a car and drove four hours north through a region called the Cerrado. The Cerrado is this mix of grasslands, savannas, and woodlands with short scrubby trees. It's a vast, beautiful landscape with yellows and browns and wide open views. There, in a small village, I joined a group of local planters hired by a California-based non-profit. They gave me a pair of snakebite gators to wear, and we headed out into the fields. So, here's my article, Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World? Read by Jonathan Davis.

This was recorded by Autumn. To listen to more stories from The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and other publications on your smartphone, download Autumn on the App Store or the Play Store. Visit autumn, that's A-U-D-M dot com, for more details. On a hot morning in April, near the start of Brazil's dry season, four women and two men walked single file across a sodden field at the edge of Engenho, a village in the northern part of Goya state. They wore long sleeves and wide-brimmed hats to protect against the sun,

and leather gaiters and gloves to protect against snakes. In a plastic tub, they carried an entire forest. The women and men who made up this team of tree planters were all Kalunga, descendants of enslaved people who centuries ago fled into the Brazilian Cerrado, the vast region of grasslands, savannas, and open woodlands that covers much of the country's southern half. Nestled amid Goyas' forbidding mesas, Kalunga villages remained largely isolated from the outside world until the 1980s.

Anthropologists arrived first, then teachers. The planting team's leader, Damião Santos, a trim, meditative man of 37 years, remembers when the first tourists showed up, attracted by nearby waterfalls. More and more, clay tiles and brick were used as building materials in place of the traditional spars and fronds of the Buri Cipam. Electricity came to the village. Then, a year ago, an organization appeared in the region, offering trees. In the middle of the field, Santu stopped and pointed. There, nestled between tufts of grass, were three trees.

They were several inches high and had two leaves each. Trees of similar size and shape were all around, Santu said. This wasn't really a field. It was a forest. As we walked, I tried to avoid crushing it. Finally, we reached a part of the field that was still a field. The planters dropped their packs and set to work. With a small one-handed hoe, a planter opened a hole in the wet earth, which parted with a squelch.

A second planter took one of the trees, some of which had leaves and roots and were the height of a half-used pencil, others of which were the size and shape of a marble, and tucked it into the hole. Each tree, situated about a pace away from its neighboring trees, took less than a minute to put in the ground. Santos said that over the last three weeks, the team had planted some 30,000 trees. The group behind this effort, the California-based Eden Reforestation Projects, had hired Santos and the other villagers to plant the trees because it believed that doing so would reduce poverty in the region while helping to alleviate both the local problem of deforestation and the global problems of biodiversity loss and climate change. As the slogan on the back of Santos' t-shirt put it,

Planchi arvoris, salvi vidas. Plant trees, save lives. In a broader sense, the non-profit was paying residents of Ingeniu to plant trees because individual and corporate donors, especially in the United States and Europe, wanted people in other parts of the world to plant trees. The idea that planting trees can effectively and simultaneously cure a host of the world's most pressing maladies has become increasingly popular in recent years, bolstered by a series of widely cited scientific studies and by the inspiring and marketable goal, memorably proposed by a charismatic 13-year-old, of planting one trillion trees. of planting one trillion trees. The growing demand for tree planting is reflected in the ranks of the tree planting organizations. In a study published last year in the journal Biological Conservation,

a group of researchers led by Meredith Martin, a North Carolina State University forest ecologist, found that the number of tree planting groups working in the tropics has increased by nearly 300 percent since the early 1990s to more than 170. Most of that increase came in the last decade. The number of trees those organizations have reported planting meanwhile has increased by nearly 5,000 percent, although further information about these trees, including about how many of them still exist, is generally scant.

Some of the tree-planting outfits are non-profits, like Eden. Others seek profits. Some plant the trees themselves, as Eden does, while others play intermediary roles, collecting and dispersing donations to organizations that plant the trees. Many of the companies offer trees at prices well within the reach of the average American or European consumer. One Tree Planted promises to plant one tree for each dollar it receives in donation. So do Earth Day, the National Forest Foundation, Grow Clean Air, ReTree, Team Trees, $1 One Tree, and Trees for Trees. Plant for the Planet has one euro trees. Just one tree and more trees each offer one pound trees. Just one tree and more trees each offer one pound trees. Trees for the future will plant a tree for 25 cents on average. Eden will do it in most places for as little as 15 cents.

The trees being planted in Ngeniu cost 33 cents apiece. The act of planting a tree is easy to envision, and as a solution to threats like climate change, biodiversity loss, and global poverty seems almost magically simple. The tree planters have at times overstated just how simple their task is, but in nearly all cases their claims seem to be motivated not by ill intent, but by a conviction that planting trees is indeed an effective solution to all manner of problems, that the cause is so worthy and urgent as to excuse small exaggerations and mischaracterizations and the frequent conflation of the word trees with less impressive words like seeds and seedlings.

For Santos, the appearance of Eden in the area was all but a miracle, he said. The population of Ingenio had grown from just 150 people when he was a boy to more than 800 today, he said, severely straining the patches of forest that the villagers relied on for building supplies and fuel. Santos had been part of a recent grant-funded effort to map the 39 Colunga settlements, along with the region's springs. He had hoped the map would also eventually be used to guide reforestation, although it seemed unlikely that there would be money. to guide reforestation, although it seemed unlikely that there would be money.

Then, last year, Eden arrived, offering to pay villagers to plant trees. It seemed like a dream, Santu said. I even joked with them that it sounds too good to be true. In a world of grasshopperish myopia, planting trees has long been a symbol of ant-like forethought. For what more august, more charming and useful than the culture and preservation of such goodly plantations that shade to our grandchildren give? The British forester John Evelyn wrote in the 1660s, quoting Virgil, Similar quotations are attributed to sages like Voltaire and Warren Buffett.

A frequent saying on the websites of tree-planting companies is a venerable so-called Chinese proverb. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today. Planting trees became even more virtuous with the realization of the threats posed by anthropogenic climate change. What had been one of trees' most mundane features, that they are composed largely of carbon,

became one of their most important. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to limit carbon and other emissions, led first to the sale of carbon credits from low-emitting companies to high-emitting companies, then to the creation of carbon credits based on natural carbon sinks, including some forests. These forest-based credits allowed companies to offset their emissions and provided a continuous revenue stream to the holders of the credits,

so long as the carbon remained locked away. From a marketing perspective, though, carbon credits have several disadvantages. They require expensive third-party verification. They are abstract. Their transactions tend to happen in metric tons and hectares, the unit of measurement favored by professional foresters. The word hectare has never appeared in an inspiring quote. Individual trees, on the other hand, can be grasped by even the most ill-informed consumer, can be quickly added together into fantastic-sounding sums, and, in theory at least, provide all the same carbon-storing, climate-mending benefits of more carefully

vetted carbon credits. They lend their planters an air of wisdom, even saintliness. In 2004, Wangadi Matai, a professor of veterinary anatomy and member of Kenya's parliament, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her role as the founder of the Green Belt Movement, which, beginning in the late 1970s, paid rural women to plant trees around their villages. The effort, an educational and environmental project, spread to other countries in Eastern Africa, and by Matai's count, had planted more than 30 million trees by the time she won her prize. In 2006, Matai launched a billion-tree campaign

with the United Nations Environment Program and others called Plant for the Planet. Her public success inspired a nine-year-old German boy named Felix Finkbeiner. In a presentation to his fourth grade class in 2007, he proposed that children should plant one million trees in every country on earth. That was the biggest number I could come up with or something, Finkbeiner told me when I spoke with him in 2019. Soon after, his class planted a crab apple tree outside the school. Soon after, his class planted a crabapple tree outside the school. Word of Finkbeiner's proposal spread across Germany, then abroad, coalescing into a children's movement also called Plant for the Planet.

By 2010, it said it had planted its millionth tree. The next year, when he was 13, Finkbeiner spoke before the United Nations as part of its International Year of Forests. It was then that he suggested a finish line. It is now time that we work together, he said. We combine our forces, old and young, rich and poor, and together we can plant a trillion trees. Maatai died that September, and in December, the United Nations handed leadership of its Billion Tree Campaign to Finkbeiner's Plant for the Planet, which at some point added hyphens to its name.

A few years later, it became the Trillion Tree Campaign. It wasn't clear, though, whether Earth could hold a trillion more trees, or even how many it already had. There was very little information on those questions. Finkbeiner told me in 2019. It happened that a founding member of Plant for the Planet, Gregor Hindler, was the roommate of Thomas Crowther, then doing post-doc work at the Yale School of Forestry. Hindler prevailed upon Crowther to help investigate.

In 2015, Crowther, Hindler, and a group of colleagues published their answer in the journal Nature. answer in the journal Nature. Using a blend of satellite images, artificial intelligence, and extrapolation, they estimated that Earth held roughly three trillion trees, about half its total when people first began practicing agriculture about 10,000 years ago. Furthermore, they concluded something like 15 billion trees were still being cleared each year for a net loss of about 10 billion trees annually. The paper sparked a large number of media reports. My blog post for Nautilus magazine was among them. While the Nature paper did not discuss whether the world could fit another trillion trees, the implication was clear.

As Hitler told me at the time, we can now say there's plenty of space. In 2019, Crowther was the senior author of a second study that further accelerated the tree planting movement. Led by Jean-Francois Baston, then a member of the lab that Crowther leads at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the study estimated that an additional 0.9 billion hectares of Earth's surface could support forests and woodlands. If all those hectares were allowed to grow to maturity, they could store some 205 gigatons of carbon, or what Crowther estimates to be one-third of the carbon that people have released into the

atmosphere to date. In the study's abstract, the authors wrote that their research highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date. Looking back on the controversy that would result, Crowther would later say, I wish we'd communicated things with better skill. Many of the people I spoke with called the science paper a tipping point. Greenhouse Communications, a marketing company hired by Crowther's Lab, reports on its website that the science article spawned more than 700 media reports.

A CBS News headline. Planting a trillion trees could be the most effective solution to climate change, study says. A Guardian headline. Tree planting has mind-blowing potential to tackle climate crisis. An AP headline. Best way to fight climate change? Plant a trillion trees. In 2020, President Trump promised American support for the World Economic Forum's Trillion Tree Initiative

to protect and restore one trillion trees by 2030. This was not to be confused with the Trillion Trees campaign run by Plant for the Planet, nor with the Trillion Trees program initiated in 2016 by the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and BirdLife International. Many countries made their own pledges, including Well-Treed Canada, which pledged to plant 2 billion trees, and Nearly Treeless Saudi Arabia, which pledged 10 billion trees. Celebrities joined the effort, including Jane Goodall, Gisele Bundchen, and Elon Musk,

who for a period in 2019 changed his Twitter handle to Treelon. After years of struggling to secure funding, numerous tree-planting organizations saw their fortunes turn around. Maxime Renaudin founded Tree Nation in 2006. When I started planting trees, I had to explain to everybody why, why it would make sense to plant trees, he told me. Over the course of the years,

it became completely redundant. If I tried to start explaining why planting trees, people would just stop me and say, yeah, I know. Many scientists watch the growing popularity of tree planting with unease. The problem isn't with tree planting in theory. Nearly everyone agrees that planting trees can be a useful, wholesome activity.

The problem is that, in practice, planting trees is more complicated than it sounds. Tree planting is viewed as this panacea that can spur economic development. It can fight climate change. It can contribute to wildlife habitat, even health benefits, water protection, all of these things, says Meredith Martin of North Carolina State.

Of course, you can get some benefits in all of those realms with planting trees. But depending on the species you use, there's just going to be trade-offs in terms of how effective it is. in terms of how effective it is. Martin and her colleagues collected data from the websites and annual reports of 174 organizations that plant trees in the tropics. 682 different species of trees were mentioned. That feels like a lot, but there's maybe 50,000 tree species in the tropics, Martin says. Most of those species were named only once. By far the most widely mentioned species were familiar tree crops

like cacao, coffee, and mango, good for economic development, less so for storing carbon or supporting biodiversity. In a 2019 study, researchers found a similar pattern in restoration plans that had been published for the most part in response to the Bond Challenge, whose mission is to reforest 350 million hectares of degraded and deforested land by 2030. of degraded and deforested land by 2030. In the 24 national plans that had been made public by then,

61 countries now support the goal. Nearly half the land involved was slated to be turned into plantations of fast-growing commercial trees. The carbon these monocultures store is mostly released in a decade or so when the trees are harvested, the researchers wrote. Perhaps a bigger question is where a trillion trees could be planted. The day after my visit to Engenho with Damião Santos and other Eden Reforestation employees, I met a group of scientists a couple of hours to the south in the Parque Nacional

da Chapada dos Verdeiros. Located on a high plateau, the park is a mosaic of open grasslands and savanna, the latter a tangle of brushy plants and compact leathery trees that offer little shade.

Flat-sided mountains bound an otherwise unobstructed sky. The area is known for its views of the stars and other celestial bodies. The nearby town of Alto Paraíso has an Area 51 restaurant and shops that sell crystals, dreamcatchers, and alien accoutrements. In the park we met Claudomiro de Almeida Corchis, that sell crystals, dream catchers, and alien accoutrements. In the park we met Claudomiro de Almeida Corchis, who used to work on a wildland fire crew with Damião Santos. As he talked, Corchis worked a head of grass between his fingers,

collecting its pinprick seeds in his palm. He became interested in the Cejados flora during his time on the fire crew. In 2017, he started Cerrado Jipe, a non-profit that works to restore former pasture and other degraded ecosystems in and around Chapada dos Verdeiros. Behind Corchis was one such restored area. Instead of the lush, even green of the surrounding pastures, the vegetation here was a mottled dun, many textured, thin and low to the ground.

The roots of the cejado plants went deep, reaching down to the water table. It is an upside-down forest, Corchi said. Cejado da Pez planters had sown nearly 200 species of native grasses, sedges, rushes, herbs, and bushes, plants of all sizes and shapes. Scientists estimate that the Cerrado is home to some 12,000 species of plants, many of which are found nowhere else. Some local conservationists were alarmed when Eden appeared in northern Goya state

and announced its plans to plant trees and only trees. In June 2021, the ecologists Rafael Oliveira and Natascha Pilon attended a meeting of local officials to evaluate environmental project proposals, including a presentation by Eden. They said they would create job opportunities, Oliveira said, describing Eden's message. He and Pilon said they were shocked. Much of the Cerrado has been turned to pasture or farmland, fractured by roads and human settlements. But in northern Goya state, it remains largely intact.

They chose one of the most conserved areas in the Cerrado to plant trees, Pilon said. in the Cerrado, to plant trees, Pilon said. Oliveira said that he told Eden's representatives, you came to the wrong place. Stephen Fitch, Eden's founder, told me that, to the contrary, the Cerrado ecosystems of northern Goyas were not as pristine as often assumed, and that the Calunga had identified large areas of degraded forest in their territories that would benefit from Eden's trees. I don't mean to be defensive, but one of the things we encounter on a regular basis is people

sitting in the academy critiquing people who are actually doing something, Fitch says. critiquing people who are actually doing something, Fitch says. After planting trees around the village of Engenu, Eden plans to expand into other Kalunga villages. Scientists who study savannahs, prairies, and other grasslands say the dispute is a familiar one. There are large areas of the world where the climate could support forests, but where there are not forests. Some of these areas formerly held forests, others did not. Grassland scientists say tree-planting advocates have tended to view all those areas as equally

ripe for reforestation. These experts argue that such areas are not degraded forests, but rather ancient, biodiverse, and carbon-rich ecosystems, worthy of protection in their own right. There's a peculiar forest fetish and obsession, which I think is traced back to Europe, possibly Germany, says William Bond, professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who studies grasslands.

I think it's a massive misunderstanding of the natural world. Grassland scientists were dismayed when the World Resources Institute, a research non-profit, published its 2011 Atlas of Forest and Landscape Restoration Opportunities, which purported to show where people could restore forests and degraded land. It largely looked like a map of the savannas and grasslands of the world, says Joseph Veldman, lands of the world, says Joseph Veldman, a Texas A&M University ecologist who studies grasslands, savannas, and forests. In a 2015 study, he and his co-authors wrote that the WRI map misidentified nine million square kilometers of grasslands, savannas, and open canopy woodlands as deforested or degraded.

By directing the attention of tree-planting campaigns toward those grasslands, he thought, the map could threaten the existence of countless species and ecosystems. The World Resources Institute, for its part, says that the Atlas was intended to raise global awareness and does not call for planting trees in grasslands. As the tree planting movement's momentum grew, grassland scientists protested in bold terms, delivered in letters and articles with titles like Tyranny of Trees and Grassy Biomes and grassy biomes, an inconvenient reality for large-scale restoration? Then, in 2019, Jean-Francois Bastin and the Crowther Lab published their paper in Science. Veldman says that the study made the same mistake that he thought the World Resources Institute map made nearly a decade earlier,

treating grasslands as degraded forests. Worse, he says, was that it drastically overestimated the climate-mending effects of planting trees. They did the carbon accounting equivalent of you or me buying a house for $100,000, fixing it up with $50,000 of improvements, selling it for $200,000, than bragging about how we made $200,000 in profit, he says. Veldman led nearly 50 scientists in a written response, which concluded that the estimates by Bastogne et al. of potential carbon sequestration were approximately five times too large.

Bastogne, Crowther, and their colleagues eventually offered a correction on several points, including their assertion that tree restoration was the best tool for climate mitigation. This was incorrect, they wrote, modifying their original statement to say that tree restoration was among the most effective strategies to combat climate change. Crowther maintains, though, that they did not consider grasslands to be degraded forests and that their carbon estimates were accurate. He points out that subsequent studies,

including one published in May, have provided similar estimates. Crowther says he was surprised by the widespread reaction to the paper. It was merely intended to highlight the potential scope of natural regeneration

of ecosystems, he says, and dismay that it was seen as justification for mass tree planting. He notes that the world continues to lose trees at a far faster rate than it gains them, and that planting trees can be a locally useful tool of restoration. But planting a trillion trees, he says, would be too much of a good thing. However the study's authors intended it, many tree planters welcomed it enthusiastically. Robin Chasden, an ecologist and the author of Second Growth, The Promise of Tropical Forest Regeneration in an Age of deforestation, told me.

A lot of people were ready for this, she says. I mean, a lot of people were just ready for something to grab onto, like, oh, here's the scientific report, we can just go with this. It feeds into our agenda very nicely. Even if they did not mean to, average American consumers are likely to have contributed to the global tree planting movement through their purchases.

Trees are offered as a bonus alongside many goods and services, including home nut milk makers, Prius lift kits, two-dimensional Christmas trees, whiskey, cannabis, CBD oil, vaporizers, woolen cat caves, velvet sneakers, socks that are meant to be worn outside without shoes, reusable menstrual pads, yoga mats, healing crystals, Yoga mats, healing crystals, cold play tickets, a debit card, a search engine, a mobile phone plan, a flat rate energy plan, the honorary title of Scottish layered ship or ladyship, a visit to the Amazonico restaurant in Dubai, a visit to an axe throwing venue in Michigan, Ladybug Lad's non-fungible tokens, Crypto Barista non-fungible tokens, wooden AirPods cases, wood-burning camp stoves, wood-burning pizza ovens, journals with wooden

covers, journals with paper made not of wood pulp but of calcium carbonate, and a literary journal. and a literary journal. Amazon, Shell, HP, MasterCard, Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever, and UPS are among the large and ubiquitous companies that have supported or pledged support for tree planting efforts. Climate change is an issue that is much bigger than one person. But when we work together, we can make a difference. Amazon declared in a recent blog post announcing that the company was donating $1 million in $1 trees. The trees appear as ever-increasing tallies on the websites of the tree-planting organizations.

One tree planted claims to have planted more than 40 million trees. Trees for the Future claims 250 million trees. Earlier this year, on the website of the tree planting search engine Ecosia, I watched, mesmerized, as over the course of five minutes, the ticker showing the number of trees planted by the Ecosia community climbed steadily from 141,483,550 to 141,483,762. Tree, tree, tree, tree, tree. The tree-planting product tie-ins and corporate sponsorships and rapidly rising numbers give the impression of a movement that is barreling toward one trillion trees. But it is surprisingly difficult to tell where things really stand.

Simply adding together the published tree tallies won't work, because of the complex web of relationships among the various tree planting organizations and campaigns. Ecosia, for example, gets money from advertisements and then distributes it to planting partners, including Eden Reforestation Projects and Trees for the Future. All three organizations prominently display on their websites the number of trees they have planted, while they display much less prominently the workings of their various partnerships. The fact that tens or even hundreds of millions of the trees

they count on their respective websites are probably the same trees listed on Ecosia's and a partner's websites is left to inference. Ecosia, strictly speaking, is a tree financing organization, says Peter Van Midwood, Ecosia's chief tree planting officer. When our tree planters say proudly how many trees they've planted, we're not going to say, no, you're not allowed to say that because the claim is with us. We had those discussions, but we found it too childish. He adds that Ecosia counts trees for its own purposes, not to contribute to any grand total. Further muddling the picture, the tree planting movement's eagerness

to take credit for trees that have been planted can sometimes veer toward taking credit for trees that have not been planted. The website of the American chapter of 1T.org, for instance, reports that its various partner organizations have so far pledged to plant 50.9 billion trees by 2030. Of those trees, 48.2 billion were pledged by Eden, which claims to have produced, planted, and protected some 977 million trees over the past 17 years. Eden operates on donations, and as of its most recently available tax filing, the 48.2 billion trees had not yet been paid for. Jad Daly, the president and chief executive of American Forests, which leads 1T.org's U.S. chapter, says that the trees would assuredly be planted. Everyone in this movement knows that one of the things that can really undermine our

success is the perception that we're celebrating ambition, but we're not actually delivering accomplishment, he says. Stephen Fitch, Eden's founder, says that his organization is expanding exponentially. It aims to plant a billion trees annually by 2024. So the whole economies of scale and skill kicks in at an impressive rate, he says. An even bigger challenge in trying to judge the collective achievements of the global tree planting campaigns stems from the fact that people are not really planting trees, which offer a host of benefits and are famously tough, capable of surviving for hundreds or sometimes thousands of years,

and of weathering all kinds of trials and insults. They are planting seeds or seedlings, which offer few benefits and are not tough at all. Seedlings are like baby plants, says Lalisa Deguma, an ecosystem restoration expert based in Australia. If we don't care for babies, we know what happens. In the early 1990s, when Deguma was in middle school in western Ethiopia,

his class participated in annual tree planting campaigns. Every year, he recalls, the government provided seedlings for the class to plant, and all their planted seedlings always died. Every year we are going to the same place to do the same activity, he says. And all their planted seedlings always died. Every year we are going to the same place to do the same activity, he says. There is no change on the ground. Seedlings die by drought, fire and flood. They are eaten, shaded out, stepped on.

Often they die of simple neglect. The changing climate, which scientists predict will rearrange species and ecosystems, makes the long-term fate of any individual tree even more uncertain. While there are many examples of successful planting efforts, the scientific literature also includes numerous examples of tree planting ventures that have resulted in few, if any, living trees. From the outside, it can be hard to know which is which. On the website of TIST, a tree planting organization that offers $1 trees, it's possible to locate on various spreadsheets

information about the age, species, location, and trunk circumference of some 25.1 million trees. The organization conducts periodic audits of the trees for 30 years. If they die,

they are removed from the tally. We choose to focus on how many are alive, says Ben Heneke, TIST's co-founder. Few other tree planting operations are so thorough. Meredith Martin and her colleagues found that less than a fifth of the 174 tree planting organizations they examined mentioned any monitoring of their trees

after planting, and only eight companies mentioned the survival monitoring of their trees after planting, and only eight companies mentioned the survival rates of their trees. Karen Hull, a restoration ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests a conceptual shift. We should be growing trees, not planting trees, she says. We need to think about whether those trees are surviving over time, because it's going to take 10, 20 years, a century, before we really get the benefits that we want. I asked the heads of three trillion tree organizations if anyone was keeping a global total of how many trees had been planted or how many were still alive, whether we would in fact be able to tell

when we had achieved the goal of a trillion trees planted. They all said no, and that planting a trillion trees was not the goal at all. Nicole Schwab, the executive director of 1T.org, told me that her organization aims to conserve, restore, and grow one trillion trees. Reducing the achievements of the myriad organizations and individuals that make up the movement into a single figure would be both impossibly complex and misguided, she says. From our point of view, the trillion is aspirational, Schwab says. We need to be bold, to raise ambition, to put in a system where whatever is pledged is going

to be monitored. To me, that's more important than actually counting toward a trillion. more important than actually counting toward a trillion. John Lotspeech, the executive director of Trillion Trees, the collaboration between the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and BirdLife International, told me that its goal is to protect existing forests, address the root causes of deforestation, and restore degraded landscapes. While that may include planting some trees, he says, our three organizations have not been about finding a free field somewhere and putting some trees there. The third trillion tree effort, Plant for the Planet, still led by Felix Finkbeiner, who helped kick off the race toward a trillion trees with his 2011 speech at the UN,

used to display what looked like a grand total on its website, a graph showing more than 13 billion trees planted by groups around the world. Sometime in the last year or so, the graph was removed. Finkbeiner, now studying for a PhD in soil microbiology in the lab of Thomas Crowther, remains enthusiastic about the global movement. But the straightforward pitch of his youth is now laden with caveats and subtleties. We probably would prefer to see ourselves as a forest restoration movement, We probably would prefer to see ourselves as a forest restoration movement,

instead of a tree-planting movement, he told me. I think that this trillion-tree frame still totally makes sense, because it gives people a rough sense of the scale of restoration potential. Obviously, it's clear and simple and catchy. The race for a trillion trees can continue to motivate donors, but Finkbeiner says that his organization is no longer focused on counting trees. Ultimately, he believes the movement's success or failure in restoring the world's forests will be judged

not by the number of trees planted, but via satellite imagery viewed over the long term and discussed the old-fashioned way. In hectares. On that April morning, as Eden's team of tree planters continued transforming the field in Ngeniu into a future forest,

Damiao Santos drove me and two visiting Eden employees to see his vision of how that forest might look. A few miles south of the village, we parked on the edge of the red dirt road and crossed another brushy expanse following muddy tire tracks. At the edge of the field, the open landscape turned suddenly to towering forest, a mix of hardwoods and burichi palms with dense underbrush and draping vines. Water pooled among the roots, trickling from a nearby spring. Santos stooped to pick up a just-sprouted seed. He rolled it in his hands. When scientists say that people shouldn't plant trees in the Brazilian Cerrado, he said, they spoke of grasslands and savannas,

ignoring the scattered areas of dense forest like this one. These patches needed restoration too, he said. That meant planting trees. In any case, the opinions of outside scientists were secondary. The Kalunga wanted the trees, and it was their land. Later that day in Ngeniu,

I watched Eden Reforestation employees carefully counting piles of trees, working to provide the raw numbers that would eventually add to the steadily climbing tree tally on Eden's website. These trees had already fulfilled one of the tree planting movement's promises,

offering work to people in a place with few economic opportunities. It would take much longer to see whether the trees, which were really just seeds and seedlings, would grow up into the forest that Santos envisioned, providing the expected benefits to the local environment, or whether they and all of the billions or tens of billions of other seeds and seedlings

that Eden and other groups had planted around the world would survive long enough to have any meaningful impact on biodiversity or the global carbon cycle. As a solution to the world's most pressing problems, the trees seemed both obviously useful and woefully uncertain. Even as countries, companies, and individuals spend billions of dollars to fund tree-planting projects around the world, much about the trees themselves must be taken on faith. insisted that they had learned the lessons of past failures, that they had dialed back their boldest claims, that they understood tree planting to be just one solution among the many that are needed.

We know how complicated it is, says Jad Daly, the American Forest's chief executive. We know we have to get the science right, especially in a changing climate. They're saying, well, if you're focused on a trillion trees, then you're not focused on these details of ecologically appropriate, climate-informed, community-centered reforestation, which is factually false. To be honest, it's infuriating. Maxime Renaudin, the founder of Tree Nation, agrees. The tree-planting movement is working toward greater accountability and transparency, he says.

It's more important that we make a few mistakes than do nothing, he says, referring to the broader movement. We are talking about an urgent problem. Our focus should not be on perfection. Certainly any shortcomings of the tree planting movement as a whole cannot be attributed to a lack of sincerity on the part of its members. As an employee of One Tree Planted told me, at the end of the day, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, right? The next best time is, like, as soon as possible. Indeed, Stephen Fitch of Eden Reforestation Projects says one of his biggest worries about

the movement is that it's simply not moving fast enough. We really need about a hundred Edens, he says. Every one of them planting thousands, millions, billions of trees. Thank you.