Tag Archives: plant more trees

A eureka moment for the planet: we’re finally planting trees again

After centuries of bad stewardship, communities are at last starting to see the benefits of forests.

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.

Much of Europe is physically greener than it was just a few years ago. England is to plant 50m trees in a new coast-to-coast forest and newly planted saplings now cover tens of thousands of hectares of former farmland in Ireland, Norway and France. From Costa Rica to Nepal and Peru to Mongolia, tree planting has become a political, economic and ecological cause, and a universal symbol of restoration, regrowth and faith in the future. More than 120 countries promised in 2015 to plant and restore large areas of forest as a response to the climate crisis, and the UN has set a target to restore 350m hectares by 2030 – an area bigger than India.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/13/worlds-lost-forests-returning-trees

From Tree-Planting Drones to Shade-Grown Tea: Businesses Are Making Money by Reforesting the Planet

An estimated 15 billion trees are cut down each year—more than 41 million per day. Given this pace of land degradation, it’s hard to imagine how traditional reforestation methods, which rely on the hand-planting of live seedlings, could ever keep up. BioCarbon Engineering offers another way—a device, no more than two feet in height, that has the potential to plant 400,000 seeds per day—150 times faster than hand-planting carried out by a human.

http://www.wri.org/blog/2018/01/tree-planting-drones-shade-grown-tea-businesses-are-making-money-reforesting-planet

The Business of Planting Trees: A Growing Investment Opportunity

Planting trees as a business venture

The World Resources Institute (WRI) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) analyzed over 140 companies that have made landscape restoration and reforestation their core business model. Out of all those companies, 14 who had reached median sales growth of 100 percent in 2017, were showcased in a new report titled The Business of Planting Trees: A Growing Investment Opportunity.

The restoration economy, according to the report, refers to the network of businesses, investors, and consumers that engage in an economic activity related to restoring the land. And while there are no officials records on the size of the restoration economy, yet, it does include a vast array of companies, including early stage, pre-revenue startups to timber funds that manage billions of dollars. Similarly, the goods and services produced by these companies vary widely as well, from biofuels to climate-smart credit systems to green infrastructure.

http://www.wri.org/publication/business-of-planting-trees