China plans to plant forests the size of Ireland. Latin American countries have pledged to restore 20m hectares of degraded forest and African countries more than 100m hectares. India is to plant 13m hectares, and on a single day last year 1.5 million people planted 66m trees in Madhya Pradesh alone. [...]
We are seeing a great global attempt to plant and restore forest land but paradoxically we are still losing tree cover. The rate of global deforestation has slowed by more than half in 25 years but tree loss jumped 50% in 2016, and 2017 is likely to have been worse.
The greatest threat to trees used to be loggers and the expansion of farming. These are still a threat, but human-caused deforestation and degradation make forests more fire-prone, and disease, droughts linked to climate change and harmful beetles are likely to kill trees in greater numbers. [...]
We must keep planting trees but think differently. Mass, state-sponsored tree-planting has a reputation for being expensive and badly managed. When forests are planted on an industrial scale, up to 20% of the trees may die within a few years. It costs around £720 a hectare to plant a forest, so it would cost around £250bn to plant the 350m hectares that countries have signed up to. That money is just not available to developing countries.
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