The "Generation Restoration" responds with brilliant projects to plant one trillion trees across the planet
We had been intrigued for a while about our friends at Dark Matter Labs and their “trees as infrastructure” project (because we are generally interested in the transformative social power of trees). As DM writes:
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Stefano Mancuso, an internationally renowned plant neurobiologist, has pointed out that in persistent popular views plants are evolutionarily inferior, writing that ‘the plant world always gets second ranking’; for example, no plants appear on Noah’s ark.
Trees are vital for humans and other species, but we currently don’t value them. We barely notice them. But to overcome the challenges inherent in today’s rapidly unfolding ecological catastrophes, we need to start foregrounding the trees in our cities.
True to form, Dark Matter’s research makes tree planting a vital indicator of a city’s overall health, as an eco- and human-system (the benefits are recorded in the inset above).
Yet it’s all made much more sense when we heard that the latest iteration of this - called , Trees AI had made it to the final twenty of the World Economic Forum’s 1 Trillion Trees project (or 1t.org). [BTW, Trees AI is “an outcomes-based investment platform to grow and maintain urban nature-based solutions, at scale, to transition to resilient cities by connecting stakeholders, citizens and green jobs’].
About 1tr.org, here’s the intro from their UpLink platform:
There used to be about 6 trillion trees on Earth. Today, only about 3 trillion trees remain, and despite significant efforts, we continue to lose about 15 billion trees every year.
Conserving existing forests, restoring forest ecosystems and reforesting suitable lands is essential if we are to transition to a sustainable pathway for our economies and societies at the required speed and scale.
Such a transformation is the goal of 1t.org – the Trillion Tree Platform announced at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020 in Davos. Set up to support the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030), 1t.org seeks to raise ambition for 1 trillion tree commitments and empower and connect a global community of innovators and ecopreneurs who are developing the needed solutions to achieve the trillion trees goal.
Here’s the rest of t1.org’s first cohort of tree-planting pioneers and innovators, who they want to start to stamp as the “Generation Restoration”:
Borneo Nature Foundation's Community Nursery project empowers rural communities to grow, plant and protect native trees in Borneo’s carbon-rich peatlands, providing economic benefits and helping restore and safeguard these threatened forests.
Reforestum & Ecosphere+ deliver an end-to-end solution that brings transparency through technology to scale climate action, connecting companies and individuals to vital conservation and reforestation projects.
Inga Foundation's integrated Inga alley-cropping system stops tropical rainforest devastation (slash/burn), regenerates degraded land, and empowers subsistence farmers-providing 100% organic food security/cash crops with no debt or high inputs.
Dendra Systems provides a cutting edge ecosystem restoration platform that combines ecology with drone and AI technologies, making optimising and delivering transparency to biodiversity restoration projects at a scale never before possible.
Trees for the Future's Forest Garden Approach involves locally-hired technicians training smallholder farmers to sustainably plant a variety of trees and vegetables. In turn, this raises farmer income and family nutrition while revitalizing soils and sequestering carbon.
Greenstand's tree tracking app creates a digital link between tree growers and tree funders. It is an open-source community-driven software platform that enables users anywhere in the world to earn an income by growing trees.
Blacksheep is a regenerative agroforestry company that restores and protects the jungles of Costa Rica through the cultivation and sale of the highest quality lumber and superfood products.
The Reforestation Impact Security unlocks new philanthropic and investment capital for non-profit One Tree Planted to plant and track the survivability of 20 million trees in British Columbia, designed in partnership with NPX + Align17. This model is infinitely scalable and can be used by any and all reforestation non-profit organizations with measurable impact.
Justdiggit believes in regreening degraded land via low-cost, scalable landscape restoration techniques. By empowering millions of farmers through media communication and new technologies.
Pachama is developing a modern market for forest carbon credits using remote sensing and machine learning to validate and monitor reforestation and avoidance of deforestation projects.
Kijani Forestry is combating deforestation caused by the charcoal industry by working with shareholder farmers to plant millions of biodiverse trees to improve livelihoods and replace cutting of old-growth forests.
India’s Billion towards the Global Trillion is a tree plantation initiative by Global Shapers in Navi Mumbai in collaboration with the Indian government which aims to use the Miyawaki afforestation method and the Internet of Things to plant and grow One Billion Trees across India by 2030.
EcoTree's sustainable forestry solution provides ROI to individuals and businesses that finance reforestation. By buying and owning newly-planted trees in our forests, everyone can have an environmental impact and financial stake in supporting forestry.
Trees AI is an outcomes-based investment platform to grow and maintain urban nature-based solutions, at scale, to transition to resilient cities by connecting stakeholders, citizens and green jobs.
Kijani Pamoja, which means "Green Together", is uniting youth in Africa to become the 'restoration generation', giving them the right knowledge tools to be the key drivers of this movement.
WithOneSeed is community-led forestry, combining action to address deforestation and climate change with building village-based economies in Timor-Leste through international carbon markets.
Wildchain is a climate action tool that lets you adopt wildlife and plant trees to cut your carbon footprint and support real-world conservation efforts - all within a mobile game.
Earthwatch Europe is establishing 'Tiny Forests' across the UK. These dense, tennis court-sized urban forests provide a wealth of biodiversity benefits, support climate resilience and connect communities with nature.
ReGreen the Globe is a regreening movement dedicated to inspiring, uniting and empowering an alliance of diverse stakeholders to rapidly scale-up Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) across the globe.
SUGi allows anyone anywhere to invest in nature in order to build biodiversity in urban centres and create the healing and learning sites for future generations.
We should note that there is some dispute about the science that first proposed that planting 1 trillion trees worldwide would be hugely beneficial to climate targets. See this from the Verge:
Tree-planting started really trending in 2019, when a study published in the journal Science caused a commotion. It claimed that planting a trillion trees could capture more than a third of all the greenhouse gases humans have released since the industrial revolution.
After the initial media blitz rallied excitement for the seemingly simple climate solution, a group of 46 scientists, including Fleischman, responded to the study with their critique.
“Headlines around the world declared tree planting to be the best solution to climate change,” lead author of the critique Joseph Veldman said in a statement at the time. “We now know those headlines were wrong.” Veldman argued that planting trees where they don’t belong can harm ecosystems, make wildfires worse, and even exacerbate global warming.
His critique made the case that the amount of carbon the study said 1 trillion trees could sequester was about five times too large. The study also considered planting trees on savannas and grasslands, where planting non-native trees could cause problems for local species.
Planting trees on snowy terrain that once reflected the sun could even turn those places into dark patches that actually absorb heat.
The authors of the contested study stand by their work. “We are aware of no other viable climate change solution that is quantitatively as large in terms of carbon drawdown,” the authors from the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich said in their comments published in Science last October.
To be clear, critics of the campaign are still fans of trees. They still think forests play a role in solving the climate crisis — their skepticism mostly centers around efforts to plant trees in places they weren’t before, or to plant large swaths of a single species to essentially create “tree plantations” instead of real forests.
Another big concern surrounding the call for planting a trillion trees is that it could distract from other efforts to slow down climate change, like stopping fossil fuel pollution and deforestation in the first place.
“You don’t need to plant a tree to regenerate a forest,” Fleischman tells The Verge. Forests can heal on their own if they’re allowed to, he says, and these forests end up being more resilient and more helpful in the climate fight than newly planted plots of trees.
He argues that the best way to ensure there are enough trees standing to trap the carbon dioxide heating up the planet is to secure the political rights of people who depend on forests — primarily indigenous peoples whose lands are frequently encroached upon by industry and governments.