Early this year during Economic World Forum in Davos, Switzerland, many world leaders supported a plan to plant one trillion trees around the world. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}

The idea is simple and cost-effective, but it is not new. It is an extension of the earlier Billion Tree Campaign, instigated by Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement of Africa circa 1977, in February 2011 Felix Finkbeiner while addressing the United Nations proposed Trillion Tree Campaign idea.

In September 2015 scientist estimated that the number of trees on Earth is approximately 3 trillion, additionally finding that 1.2 trillion trees would be needed to counteract ten years of CO2 emissions.

So how much is done?

On the official site The Trillion Tree Campaign it says that since 2006 until 22 Feb 2020 13,638,907,054 trees have been registered around the world. That looks like an amazing achievement; in 14 years, the number of trees planted is almost two times the size of the human population. Unfortunately, that is not remotely enough as in comparison with the goal of 1,200,000,000,000 trees that is 1.14%. With the same speed, we would need 1232 years to finish the project.

For the matters to be worst, during the season of severe bushfires in Australia starting in June 2019 and still burning in February 2020, we lost 46 million acres of forest, 1 billion of animals, 34 people and approximately 5900 buildings. Even with a moderate estimate of 350 trees per acre, it means 16.1 billion trees have been lost.
Withing same time frame, about 8.8 million acres were burned in 2018, compared with 10 million in 2017.

Everything done during a period of 14 years has been undone just in a period as little as six months in 2019. When we add the ongoing deforestation removing between 3 billion and 15 billion trees a year ^{[5] [6]} and continuously increasing CO2 emission, it is understandable that some experts do not hesitate anymore to say that Climate Change can pose a near-future human extinction event.

How big is the task?

How much is 1.2 trillion? Trillion sounds like a buzz word, but writing the number 1,200,000,000,000 and realizing that we would need 38501 years to count each number pronouncing it within a second, is a bit worrying and raises the question: How are we going to do this?

As trees need at least ten years to grow to full size and that while young they do not have same ability to sequester CO2 it is reasonable to assume that we have at best 1 to 2 years to carry out the work. Experience planter can plant around 2000 to 4000 seedlings during 10 hours in a single day.
Also, let’s imagine that it would be possible to plant trees regardless of change of seasons all year long ignoring the fact many trees species have a much better rate of survival when planted during early spring or autumn. In that case, we would have around 300 days (excluding holidays, bad weather days, etc.).

We can calculate:
1,200,000,000,000 trees / 1,200,000 y/d/s (2 years * 300 days * 2000 seedlings) = 1,000,000 people we would need to employ for 2 years to work all year long.
In reality a more probable number of people would be a few times higher.

Considering that there are almost 7.8 billion people on the planet, employing 1 to 20 million people to save humanity, we must admit, is not such a large number.
So if you were wondering “is it possible?”, of course, it is, the only thing required is a will to do it - a political and personal will …

So where can we find enough people?

In ancient Rome, soldiers in their free time were making bricks. If we would employ military forces of the world that would for a change start growing and supporting life instead of destroying it - we could complete the entire project much sooner without disrupting the economy.
The world has 19,586,850 very fit young people, who, we guess, if smart enough to operate shovels while digging trenches, will surely be capable of planting a few thousand seedlings.

To plant 1.2 trillion trees, each soldier would need to plant 61266 trees (1,200,000,000,000/19,586,850) or about ~280 trees each day during 220 days of one year.
As experienced tree worker can plant more than 2000 per day, with 280 seedlings per day military personnel will have plenty of time for other activities.
Alternatively, by employing a quarter of the total military personal full time for one year while 3/4 can continue doing business as usual, those 4,896,712 soldiers could accomplish the same task by planting 1120 trees each day for 220 days.

Speaking of which, if China can shut down a city of 11 million people because of the corona virus outbreak for a few months, they can harness people to do something of similar importance, especially as China is the largest CO2 emitter.

Think about it; what can we lose? Especially if we consider that according to experts, we have only ten years left to save the world.

To complete the trillion trees project in foreseeable time, we would need to identify unused parts of the planet available for tree planting, use vertical farming to free agricultural land in favour of forests, utilize more people above military personal and create enough media coverage educating the wide population about the consequences of non-action and importance of the action in the present moment.

Using world wide logistic, country-level hierarch, organizing people into small action groups, workshops, seminars and youth action volunteers, we could speed the almost impossible looking task even further.
In Argentina a practice of group building called ‘fideicomiso’ which has renewed following the financial crisis - similar model can be applied to grow forests as a collective, self-organizing into small or big groups.

Upon completion of the project, we would need to use a certain number of resources (people/drones) to monitor trees health, progress and success rate, but also to prevent deforestation.

Next, you can read about the ways to reduce cost and some of the pros and cons of each method.

What can you do to help?

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