Trillion Tree Trickery: The Sad Truth About Tree Planting for Climate Change and Diversity

“I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree.” 

Everyone loves trees. When one grew in Brooklyn, it merited a whole book. (Sorta.) Which is part of the appeal of planting trees to reduce ambient carbon dioxide even for those who don’t buy into any aspect of global warming. Hitler sent out youth to plant trees under the Nazi Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (Reich Conservation Act); so add that to his love of dogs and loathing of smoking.

But Bill Gates is apparently below Hitler, at least for limited purposes. While very much a believer in anthropocentric global warming, he recently outraged the masses when he declared onstage at a New York Times climate summit, “I don’t plant trees.” He added that it was “complete nonsense” to think that tree planting could solve climate change. “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?”

Gad! No wonder Melinda left him!

Except he’s right; we are idiots. Collectively speaking. It appears that no level of practicable planting can impact the alleged warming that’s been predicted; the planting isn’t contributing to biodiversity; trees release some or all sequestered carbon if harvested; and while some trees are vastly superior for absorbing carbon dioxide, nobody is paying attention to that. Oh, and finally, forest lands are continuing to shrink.

The UN, former President Trump, and hundreds of companies have supported a campaign to plant a trillion trees. Former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was a big booster. The Biden administration has allocated $1 billion for tree-planting projects, but, in doing so, cited numerous very real advantages of trees. Fair enough.

Certainly, as a form of geoengineering, tree planting would be cheaper than installing the equivalent of giant catalytic converters to suck carbon dioxide from the air, and even point source sequestration such as at coal-fired power plants is a scam for rent seekers and politicians, as I’ve written elsewhere. 

Overall, those trillion trees would “require over 2 billion acres, which is to say over 2 billion football fields—greater than the total land area of the contiguous United States,” according to Climate Interactive modelers in a collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called En-ROADS. Those trillion might prevent only 0.15 degrees Celsius (0.27 Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, they calculate.  “Even if you could plant a trillion trees—which would never happen, it’s more realistic to say maybe a tenth of that—the trees will only remove 6% of what’s needed to be removed by 2050,” says Andrew Jones, executive director of the D.C.-based group. (And remember there are other alleged greenhouse gases that trees cannot sequester).

Their model has prompted criticism, but it’s not particularly compelling.

Sean DeWitt, director of the Global Restoration Initiative at the nonprofit World Resources Institute, told Fast Company that “more land is available for planting than the model assumes, because the biggest opportunity to add trees is on existing farms.” (Quoting the publication, not necessarily DeWitt.) Um, yeah. That’s called replacement, which nobody argues against. It doesn’t negate the model. We need new acreage. But where?

Not cropland. True, technology has allowed three times as much crop growing and grazing on a given area of land since 1960. But a growing world population and increasing demand for meat will increase the need for cropland. Indeed, a 2022 study in Nature Food found expansion of such land has been accelerating, with an increase of 250 million acres since 2000.

We can’t plant trees in permanently snow-covered areas in Alaska, Canada, the Nordic countries, and Russia. The dark forests would absorb more heat than the white snow did and thus “have a warming effect that exceeds the cooling effect of reducing [greenhouse gases],” as the National Academy of Sciences explained in 2019.

Nor should we plant them “in natural grassland and savanna ecosystems,” as César Terrer, the lead author of a 2021 Nature study, explained: “Our results suggest these grassy ecosystems with very few trees are also important for storing carbon in soil.” We shouldn’t plant them in wildfire-prone areas, which some say are expanding due to climate change.

Finally, most of the supposedly empty, unclaimed land targeted for tree planting is actually claimed and used by indigenous peoples and local communities. They need to be compensated, assuming they will negotiate at all. Assuming they have anyone to negotiate for them.

“For all these reasons, the United States will not be planting anything close to 1 trillion trees, nor will the world,” says Climate Interactive.

Ultimately, tree planting doesn’t fit the “every little bit helps” category. It’s like shooting a slingshot at Godzilla, whom we know from the movies can’t be destroyed even by Japan’s might army and air force. Godzilla, or global warming as it were, won’t slow by a single pace.

To a great extent, the trillion tree tumult can be traced back to one person, ecologist and Welshman Thomas Crowther, former chief scientific adviser for the United Nations’ Trillion Trees Campaign. 

He now allegedly regrets the role he played, as he discussed in a Wired article last December. “Stop Planting Trees, Says Guy Who Inspired World to Plant a Trillion Trees.” But he doesn’t seem to have learned.

Trillion Trees took root humbly and reasonably in 2006. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, inspired The Billion Tree Campaign, with companies and governments hopping aboard. And indeed, within a year, a billion trees were planted under the auspices of the UN. This objective was then raised to seven billion trees, one for every person on the planet at the time, and within a few years that was also accomplished.

But then in 2015, collecting and analyzing data from other scientists, Crowther and colleagues published a map of forest density in 2015 that suggested there were three trillion trees on Earth, far higher than previously thought. With room for plenty more.

Whereupon the 2020 World Economic Forum, held in Davos, announced the creation of the One Trillion Tree program, led by the UN Environment Program and the UN Food and Agricultural organization (FAO). Then-President and forum participant Donald Trump committed the U.S. to the initiative.

Later, Crowther got more specific. His lab at ETH Zurich reported in 2019 that the Earth had room for “an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover,” meaning an additional 1.2 trillion trees, according to the accompanying press release, which also said that would “absorb more carbon than human emissions each year.” This “highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date.” Crowther later gave dozens of interviews to that effect, said Wired. 

Then came a big “Oops!” After much criticism, Crowther’s team issued an erratum in which, among many other things, it retracted the “most effective” terminology and replaced it with knowing of “no other current carbon drawdown solution that is quantitatively as large in terms of carbon capture.”

Damage done.

Al Gore mentioned the study to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who signed onto the initiative, and Crowther became one of the project’s advisers. Then countries began hatching their own tree-planting schemes independent of the Trillion Tree goal because it seemed like such a nifty thing. 

Mind you, planting a few billion trees isn’t difficult. But you don’t need to be a professional arborist to know that eventually the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Planters become more limited in what types of trees, seeds, or saplings; quality of seed; diversity of tree; types of soil; rainfall, and so on are available.  A trillion trees is not simply a thousand times as expensive and difficult as a million.

Then, in December, Crowther was chief author of another paper in the most prestigious science journal, Nature. There, he claimed, “Although forests cannot be a substitute for emissions reductions, our results support the idea that the conservation, restoration and sustainable management of diverse forests offer valuable contributions to meeting global climate and biodiversity targets.”

See what he did? No more talk about planting new trees, except where trees already were but have been removed. That means land that clearly can support trees because it already does. If it hasn’t, there’s probably a good reason.

It’s not particularly nuanced, but either people don’t understand what mass tree-planting projects require or they don’t care. Or … something.

Consider the Philippines. Tree planting there has long been a major governmental concern. In 1977, President Ferdinand Marcos decreed that everyone over age 10 had to plant a tree a month for five consecutive years. This, not surprisingly, took place during a period of massive logging for exports. Tree planting is often a smokescreen for overlogging. His successor repealed the law, but since then, much legislation has mirrored that, albeit it is surely toothless. What is currently enforced is pulling kids out of the classroom to plant trees in a country where 15-year-olds rank 77th out of 81 countries globally in the student OECD PISA assessment. Results in math, reading, and science were all dismal. But, by golly, they’re planting trees.

The Philippines in some ways is ideal for mass planting because it has suffered major deforestation. By 2023, most of the country’s trees had been felled, according to the government. So the country has planted and planted, and indeed it is noted in the “Guinness Book of World Records” for most trees planted simultaneously in different areas.

“But look today at the coastline where most of the trees were planted,” observed Yale Environment 360. “There is no sign of the mangroves that, after a decade of growth, should be close to maturity. An on-the-ground study published in 2020 found that fewer than 2 percent of them had survived. The other 98 percent had died or were washed away.”

Another major flaw in the overall Filipino program is that while mangroves are indeed native, only about a sixth of trees designated for planting have been native, with a track record for surviving and thriving. A huge percentage are mahogany, which produces gorgeous wood but is not ideal for carbon dioxide absorption because it crowds out other trees. “It is self-centered and vain,” poetically observes one environmentalist publication. It literally transforms the soil to its own liking. Teak is similar, yet also a favorite among tree planters ostensibly Saving The Planet. That said, at least hardwoods are not burned and thus, when converted into furniture, do not release their carbon dioxide, as they do with using biomass for energy production — another scam I have discussed.

But a vastly better candidate is the lowly bamboo, which can be made into furniture, floorboards, and is the primary component of my bedsheets. Actually a form of grass, it’s friendly to other species and grows very densely. Bamboo grows incredibly fast, up to almost three feet a day; cutting it actually stimulates growth; it can sequester carbon dioxide much faster than woody trees; and it’s virtually fireproof.

Ultimately, for all the bravado, forested Filipino land continues to shrink because more trees are being felled and sold than successfully planted. Even if the newly planted ones weren’t being washed or blown away, a tiny little tree cannot approach the absorption level of the large harvested ones.

The Filipino experience has, is, and will be repeated around the world — with documented massive failures in such places as China and Turkey. The repeating pattern is to emphasize planting “but not monitoring and measuring their survival in the long term,” Ennia Bosshard, first author of a paper on the subject in the science journal Diversity told the publication Mongabay. It’s a scam, short and simple.

The fact is that from 1990 to 2020, the planet lost a bit over 4 percent of its forests, an area equal to about half the size of India. The best that can be said is perhaps that it could have been worse.

Biodiversity has also gone out the window. Around the world, “People Plant Trees For Utility More Often Than For Biodiversity Or Carbon,” notes the title of a 2022 Biological Conservation paper. 

The study identified 174 organizations engaged in reforestation efforts in the tropics, documenting a variety of tree species and genera. However, the recorded species represent only a small fraction of the total tree species found in tropical regions. Many organizations reported only a single species, with half reporting fewer than five. The study highlighted a preference for planting the same type of tree, likely for ease and cost-effectiveness, rather than diversifying. Additionally, as always, there was a notable lack of monitoring and measuring of survival rates among the organizations, suggesting a focus on planting rather than growing trees.

Technology can certainly help, but people have to want to apply it. The Australian company AirSeed Technologies has developed drones they claim can plant 25 times faster than humans, and do so in remote, hazardous, and inaccessible areas. It says it aims to drop 100 million seed pods a year by 2024 — hopefully nothing a la Jack Finney. But for the math-challenged, that’s still just 1 percent of a trillion.

Of course, many of those who favor planting trees for global warming and diversity purposes mean well. But the overall driving force of Trillion Treeism appears to be politics and propaganda. Don’t assume the likes of Trump and Kevin McCarthy were fooled; tree planting makes political sense for those who are worried that serious carbon dioxide schemes are harmful to economies and our way of life, including most readers of this magazine.

Companies have signed on because it’s a great form of “greenwashing,” sometimes defined as “behavior or activities that make people believe that a company is doing more to protect the environment than it really is.” It’s mostly likely done by companies considered to be harming the environment, but is cynical enough to include Pornhub’s 2014 claim to plant a tree for every 100 videos watched — “Putting seeds in the ground for the amount of seed they cause to be thrown out,” a Reddit wag called it. Environmental group publications are all over the greenwashing aspect, as with the NRDC’s “Planting Trees Isn’t a Climate Plan; It’s a Distraction.”

But the planting mania also reflects an unsolvable problem. Carbon dioxide emissions will keep increasing for the indefinite future, and there’s nothing we in the West can do about it because almost a third is now coming from China. Even though its population is shrinking, it’s upwardly mobile and that creates higher outputs. India is moving up the list, while contributions from the U.S. and Europe are receding. Even if tree planting could sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide (and remember there are other alleged greenhouse gases), it couldn’t make a dent in the growth of emissions, much less what’s already in the atmosphere. We’re going to need new technologies, such as commercialized fusion.

So long as it’s not to keep the planet from turning into a cinder, there’s nothing wrong with planting trees and a lot right with it. A variety of trees means providing habitats for a wide variety of wildlife. Trees can conserve soil and play a role in water management. They can cool urban areas where there really and truly has been increased warming. Trees can enhance the beauty of landscapes and just plain make us feel better. And yes, of course, we need tree products. But as even Crowther finally admitted, it’s obviously better to keep trees from being felled than replacing them. Planting new trees is called “proforestation” as opposed to afforestation, and there are organizations like Regeneration.org that have all sorts of ideas on encouraging it. But that must include payments. Nobody fells trees for the sheer fun of it; but rather to make a profit.

Ultimately, we can’t plant and sustain a trillion trees, and it’s a ridiculous goal. We can plant and sustain a lot, if we make that our goal. So far it has not been.

Michael Fumento is an attorney, author, journalist, and former paratrooper who has written for National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, The American Spectator, Human Events, Forbes, Reason, Policy Review, the Spectator (London), the Sunday Times of London, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, and many other publications.

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