The illusion of saving the planet with a trillion trees

When the billionaire Salesforce chief executive, Marc Benioff, appeared on the sidelines of the COP26 climate summit in November 2021 he was jubilant.

“This is a huge moment where world leaders, philanthropists and CEOs all came together around reforestation,” he said.

More than 100 countries had just pledged to spend $19bn of public and private money to reverse forest loss. “We have lost 3tn trees on our planet,” Benioff said, punctuating his words with a clap.“We need to plant a trillion trees.” This amount, he added, would absorb 200 gigatonnes of carbon — the equivalent of two-thirds of existing human-made emissions.

His glee seemed sincere. But when a journalist asked how he would measure what was actually being done, his answer offered no clarity. He simply replied that every chief executive must go net zero, as Salesforce had, and called for “an ecopreneur revolution”.

Benioff’s vision of fighting climate change with saplings is one of three “trillion-tree” campaigns launched by business leaders and charities in the past decade, alongside more than a hundred government planting pledges. The movement has gathered momentum so quickly there is now a global seed shortage.

Tallying exactly how many trees or how much land has been promised is impossible because the campaigns are all unclear about how their individual targets overlap with each other. A recent report said governments were separately aiming to plant and restore an area almost four times the size of India.

India’s climate pledge involves changing the use of nearly two-thirds of its land

Per cent of territory to change use or be restored under nature-based solutions in climate pledges

The Land Gap Report, 2022

Their intentions are commendable: draw down carbon, nourish biodiversity and improve livelihoods by returning trees to planet Earth. But the simple idea is now rubbing against a complex reality, as some scientists raise myriad concerns — from a dearth of free land to the unreliability of new trees when it comes to carbon storage.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says protecting and restoring the world’s forests is critical for limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, but many argue political and business leaders are focusing too much on “restoring” rather than “protecting”, and latching on to methods they hope will offset emissions rather than prevent them.

At least a third of the corporations promising to plant trees under Benioff’s campaign are doing so to offset emissions, according to a Financial Times analysis of 73 pledge documents. The 46 planting pledges so far amount to at least 3bn new trees.

“It’s greenwashing,” says Kate Dooley, a lecturer specialising in carbon accounting at Melbourne university. “Corporations are greenwashing us when they say they will achieve net zero if that is relying on removing carbon through tree planting.”

Planting trees is more complicated than it sounds. Ecosystems must be restored to avoid biodiversity collapse, experts say, but “on the right land and in the right way”. Multiple projects so far have failed to benefit local people, others have created monoculture commercial plantations that are poor homes for wildlife, and a lack of continuing care means many saplings simply die.

Twenty-four of the companies claim to have already planted nearly 300mn trees, some as far back as 2004, but only two projects disclose in their pledge documents how many survived.

Jack Hurd, executive committee member of the World Economic Forum, which runs , says companies can only pledge with if they, “at the minimum, have a credible, public net zero goal before or by 2050”. He says the campaign is helping companies to better monitor their projects, including survival rates.