Plant for the Planet: Billion Trees Project

To plant a trillion trees you have to do it one at a time

Plant for the Planet is an organization for young people around the world whose goal is to plant as many trees as possible in order to directly address climate change.

Origins of the movement

To discover the origins of this initiative we have to go back in time, to 1966 Pennsylvania. That was the year when, at the University of Pittsburgh, the first woman from Central Africa graduated: Wangari Muta Maathai. Driven by high ideals, she was the founder of the Green Belt Movement: an organization composed by women from rural Central Africa who were encouraged and involved by Wangari to plant native trees throughout Kenya, to prevent excessive deforestation and the subsequent soil erosion from depriving Kenyans of their main form of livelihood: wood.

The Green Belt Movement organization has planted and fostered the growth of more than 51 million trees, thanks to the cooperation of 30,000 Kenyan women whom Wangari herself trained to carry out activities such as forestry, beekeeping and other income solutions. These activities were a form of ecological tourism that is the progenitor of modern ecotourism and they also helped the women in the process of empowerment. In 1981 Wangari became president of the National Council of Women of Kenya, and in 2004 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her “contribution to the causes of sustainable development, democracy and peace.”

In 2007 her story crossed that of Felix Finkerbeiner, a German nine-year-old boy studying Maathai for a school project about environmental sustainability. Enthusiastic about Wangari’s great deeds, Felix decided to ask his teachers to plant a tree in the school garden. For fun, Felix, helped by his teachers, created the Plant for the Planet association by involving his classmates and schoolmates.

The principal fulfilled the children’s wish and the gesture received a large media following. Thus was born Plant for the Planet, an association whose initial purpose was to reforest Germany and which, only one year later, had planted 50,000 trees. In 2011 Felix planted his millionth in front of environment ministers from 45 countries and then announced the massive Trillion Tree Project: planting a trillion trees globally.

This is where a third actor comes in: Tomas Crowther, a researcher at Yale University who had discovered that there were at least three trillion trees on our planet in 2015. Due to the media success of his publication and the collaboration with Plant for the Planet, he took charge of a research lab at ETH Zurich focused on understanding the potential of global reforestation. In 2019 he published a second article confirming that there is room in the world for another trillion trees.

It soon became the second most discussed article of the year, giving the movement a huge boost. The impact of his publications was so strong that, thanks to Al Gore’s intervention, they were presented to the World Economic Forum and to the U.S. government, which decided to participate and fund the One Trillion Trees program.

Scientific research

Plant for the Planet members are well aware that salving the planet requires more than just planting trees: it also requires actions to reduce pollution systemically in the global society. Indeed, reforestation is the only way for humans to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The need to shake the foundations of modern society to initiate a change – in the same conditions that have led to the necessity to propose solutions to save the planet – must be supported not only by ideals, but also by a solid scientific basis.

This is why Plant for the Planet funds scientific research, to obtain reliable data to best carry out both the process of forest restocking and the preservation of biodiversity. Thanks to Plant for the Planet, a scientific paper was published in 2021 discussing the reforestation of grasslands used as pasture to return tropical forest to those lands.

In 2022 three other papers were published: the first, regarding the success of reforestation through restoration of the native microbiome of the species that are used to reforest those areas, with even growth increases of 64 percent compared to a degraded microbiome; the second one discussing the successes of assisted reforestation techniques for plants native to a specific area; and lastly, one paper regarding how bird species are positively affected when reforestation is effective and not only at a local scale.

One of the ongoing researches this year considers the optimal conditions for sylvian density in reforestation projects. A second research involves the study of plants capable of sequestering nitrogen from the soil, which is a key element for their growth. The soil microbiome is also an important factor and needs to be studied: it is a complex system of bacteria and fungi that live naturally in the soil of forests and its composition varies as the composition of a forest might vary.

The microbiomes are lost each time a forest is cut down to make way for grassland. The goal of the research is to study what happens when the soil is enriched by small amounts of earth from a nearby forest by observing if the microbiome is restored and whether it is actually able to help the trees grow.

Plant for the Planet is not only promoting projects on the field, but has also created actual research complexes with seedling incubation facilities and greenhouses in which various parameters including humidity and lightning are kept under control in order to understand what will happen to the plants if weather conditions worsen.

Projects around the world

Plant for the Planet Mexico is actively funding three main reforestation projects, two of which are located in Mexico: the first one, in the Yucatan Peninsula, involves 118 people who have committed to planting 2 million trees during the rainy season (June to December) of 2022, and almost 10 million trees since 2015. The work is developed in about 20,000 hectares of land around the San Felipe Bacalar and Balam-Kù natural reserves, an area larger than Liechtenstein.

The land has diverse needs and some portions of land have been deforested and used for pasture, others have been stripped of all valuable timber trees, while different species of saplings have been left intact or decimated by fire. As experienced in the Veneto region with storm Vaia, monocultures are more vulnerable to sudden climate change and extreme weather conditions, so it is necessary to create a forest where biodiversity is respected, making it more resilient.

However, it is not possible to plant trees all year around, but only during plant growth periods, during which there are no environmental stresses that would lead to their death. Rain is the most important factor in limiting these projects: if long periods of drought were to occur, the project would be forced to stop.

In Europe, too, the efforts of Plant for the Planet are taking place; in Andalusia the goal is to plant one million trees by 2030 with tangible programs including a project for the redevelopment of the city of Granada, for which private companies and citizens are pledging to plant 200,000 trees to make it a greener and more livable city; a second project concerns the Los Alcornocales Natural Park, in the Cádiz province, whose forests are plagued by a disease called “La Seca” and have been decimated. The goal is to plant another 200,000 trees in order to regenerate the ecosystem and breathe new life into the area’s most important socioeconomic activity: sustainable cork extraction.

Transparency and social commitment

Plant for the Planet accepts funding both from governments and individuals, and being a world-cale organization, the income that needs to be managed is very high. For this reason, the company adopts a policy of extreme transparency, and all the data and reports regarding projects and donations can be viewed by everyone on their website, divided by project.

However, in order to highlight the association’s effort even more, there is an app that shows both Plant for the Planet projects and projects of other smaller associations that share the same ideals and goals. This platform allows one to view the total number of trees planted by all participants, whether they are private citizens, corporations, schools or even entire nations (which currently stands at 13.94 billion).

One can gift trees to friends, and they will be planted depending on the project one chose to fund. Each project has a variable cost depending on the taxes charged by the host nation. It is possible to have competitions between different participants, and to see who among countries, schools and individuals is most involved in planting trees, with a world ranking by category (Italy ranks 11th with 211,293,779 trees planted).

Progress can be recorded in the app by geographically indicating the area and it is possible to check via satellite the area both in previous years and in the current period, verifying the history of expenditures made for reforestation in real time.