Fifty billion seedlings: Can Ethiopia replant its ravaged forests?

Ethiopia has lost nearly all its forest cover over the past century, with land degradation now costing the country an estimated $4.3 billion a year and leaving more than 100 million Ethiopians dependent on increasingly battered farmland.

In response, the government's Green Legacy Initiative has mobilized tens of millions of volunteers to plant more than 47 billion seedlings since 2019, aiming for 50 billion by 2030, and reports forest cover rising from 17.2 percent to 23.6 percent.

Researchers note that reforestation projects of this kind usually fail at scale, though they add that even a 30 percent survival rate across a planting this large would still represent a substantial gain. Ethiopia's effort also helped it land hosting duties for next year's U.N. climate conference, a showcase opportunity built on numbers nobody has independently verified yet.

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