[INFORMATIVE] Excessive Tree Planting

Excessive Tree Planting

By: Rory Lacava

Tree Donations: Excessive Tree-planting = Lack of Biodiversity
If you are active online, you have most likely seen big companies and other corporations sharing their eco-friendly mission—planting as many trees as possible to offset our carbon footprint. However, the facts show that the way our society has gone about this tree-planting craze is still bringing more harm than good to our ecosystems.

For some background information, the explosion of tree-planting projects skyrocketed after the World Economic Forum's project, the One Trillion Trees initiative, was launched. Through research, it was determined that 'The world currently has three trillion trees and has space for a trillion more' (plant-for-the-planet.org) to help fight against climate change. This sparked many initiatives around the world to plant as many trees as we can.

However, there is often an overlooked point of biodiversity in these projects. While all this sounds like a great idea, and the initiatives taken were a great start, it has slowly been damaging our ecosystems with the ways some projects have tried to carry out the planting.

Very often, we plant monoculture forests of one singular kind of tree without researching what plants belong in that area and the variety needed to sustain the environment. For instance, planting only one type of tree will deplete the soil of nutrients, leading to competition among them for survival.

It also provides no spaces for wildlife to thrive, and new flora struggles to grow under the density in which we replant these trees. It is a serious struggle that we are now harming the environment with our good cause. There have also often been mistakes in how close we plant the trees to each other. We are accustomed to seeing extremely dense forests, when in fact, there should be enough space for the trees to mature and grow without needing to compete for nutrients or sunlight.

We can also view this through the lens of greenwashing, which is a term referring to a company’s ways of ‘pretending’ to be eco-friendly to the public, while either not practicing the same beliefs in private or putting in the effort to truly help the environment. With this knowledge, if we see big companies advertise strategies such as 'one tree planted for every purchase', there is a good chance this is the kind of planting they are doing. It may not be malicious, but it is clear there is no research or actual effort behind a lot of the participating companies' ideas.

So, how can we approach this differently? To start, we need to make sure that the trees we plant are native to the area where we're planting them. Plants that don't belong in a certain ecosystem will harm the native flora in the long run. Second, having a wider range of diversity in our plant selection will allow for a greater variety of animals to inhabit the forest, and in return, help it grow. Finally, ensuring that we are not making the upcoming environment too dense will improve its chances of survival. Hopefully, we will take greater notice of these things as we move forward with plans for reforestation and regrowth.


Works Cited
National Forest Foundation. “Is There Such a Thing as Too Many Trees?” Www.nationalforests.org,

www.nationalforests.org/blog/is-there-such-a-thing-as-too-many-trees#:~:text=When%20trees%20grow%20too%20close.

Pearce, Fred. “Phantom Forests: Why Ambitious Tree Planting Projects Are Failing.” Yale E360, 6 Oct. 2022, e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting-climate-change.

“Plant-For-The-Planet – Trillion Trees for Climate Justice.” Plant-For-The-Planet, www.plant-for-the-planet.org/.