Noting the police cars parked in front, I found my friend Leslie standing, in her sweats and slippers, on the high fence of her backyard, embracing the trunk of the magnificent balsam fir tree that towered over her property. Above her, harnessed to the tree, was a helmeted young man with a chainsaw dangling from his tool belt. Below her, on the ground, were two cops.

“I don’t understand why we’re cutting down trees like this when the city has declared a climate emergency,” Leslie said. The cop suggested she come down off the fence. She wasn’t budging. Stalemate hung in the air.

As she explained from her perch, Leslie had tried every legal avenue – writing to all the relevant offices at the city – to defend that tree, which her new neighbour had applied to remove to make way for a bigger and better house. This was her last resort: clinging to it for dear life. Its dear life.

That battle was lost; by the end of the day, that fir tree was firewood. And now a three-storey house with a footprint in excess of Toronto’s zoning bylaws stands where it once did. But the war is far from over. Now, more than ever, cities are recognizing the critical importance of the urban forest to their livability, and they’re working hard to translate that recognition into action.

“Nobody disputes that trees are good,” says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Chicago who researches the impact of urban vegetation on human cognition and emotion. “But the question – especially when budgets are tight – is how good? Why good? And are they worth it?”

City dwellers have always appreciated trees for the beauty they offer, the birdlife they harbour and the shade they cast over sidewalks in the dog days of summer. But in the context of the climate crisis, it’s their less visible benefits that are coming to the fore: their ability to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, to reduce erosion and flooding, to absorb runoff and to mitigate the “heat island” effect that takes hold in a built environment of concrete and asphalt, air conditioners and cars.

Furthermore, as urbanization proceeds apace – the United Nations predicts that more than two-thirds of the global population will live in cities by 2050 – trees are proving essential to human health, filtering particulate matter out of polluted air and boosting mental health and overall well-being.

As the true value of the urban forest becomes more evident, most cities in North America have set expansion goals. But growing the canopy is not just a matter of planting more trees. It’s also about redressing inequities in the distribution of green space, challenging long-held assumptions about urban design and budgeting, long-term, for trees’ well-being.

As part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden allocated US$1.5 billion to urban tree-planting projects, specifically targeting poorer, racialized neighbourhoods. The issue of “tree equity” is gaining currency, particularly in the U.S., where the disparities are most glaring. In 2021, American Forests, a national conservation non-profit based in Washington, D.C., launched a Tree Equity Score that correlates the physical characteristics of a given area – the canopy, surface temperature and building density – with socio-economic metrics like the income, employment level, age and race of its residents. The score, between zero and 100, reflects the equity of tree distribution.

According to American Forests’ data, white-majority neighbourhoods in the U.S. enjoy 33% more tree canopy than communities of colour. As the climate warms and extreme heat events hit cities, this divide becomes less a matter of fairness than of survival. Between 2011 and 2020, the heat-related death rate among Black New Yorkers was twice as high as that of their white counterparts. In the summer of 2022, Phoenix, Arizona, the hottest large city in the U.S., saw a record 359 heat-related deaths, with the highest rates among Black and Indigenous men. Phoenix has become the first city in the U.S. to publicly aspire to “tree equity” by 2030, meaning a city-wide score of 100.

“We’re trying hard to drive resources to the communities that need it most,” says Maisie Hughes, vice-president of urban forestry at American Forests. The colour-coded map of tree equity scores across the U.S. makes this possible. For Hughes, a landscape architect and a woman of colour, the project is as much about trees as it is about overturning the deeply racist “social construct of America.”

In recent decades, rising urbanization and climate disruptions have led to declining urban tree cover on all continents except Europe. Cities in North America are working to counter that trend.

Last November, New York City Council announced that it would be increasing the city’s canopy from the current cover of 22% to 30% by 2035. Phoenix, located on the arid Sonoran Desert, is aiming to boost its coverage from 10% today to 25% by 2030. On average, Canadian cities have more canopy coverage, with the National Capital Region (which includes Gatineau Park) leading the pack at 46%, followed by Halifax at 43%. Toronto is aiming for 40% tree canopy by 2050, up from the roughly 28% it’s at today. But there are countervailing forces. A single ice storm took out 900 trees in Montreal last April, and the city – which announced the planting of 500,000 new trees in its 2020–2030 Climate Plan – has had to fell thousands of trees blighted by the emerald ash borer, an invasive species that has decimated the ash population across North America over the last two decades.

But the successful urban forest is not just a matter of numbers. In 2005, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced with great fanfare that his city would be receiving a million new trees. The plan didn’t account for the cost of water, or the fact that most trees would have to be planted on private land and require the cooperation of citizens. When Villaraigosa left the mayor’s office eight years later, L.A. was only some 400,000 trees richer.

Roughly half of the urban land available for trees in North American cities is privately owned. Conserving and expanding the canopy requires a public that is educated about the importance of trees and willing to help maintain them. Grassroots greening initiatives abound, says Danijela Puric-Mladenovic, a professor of urban forestry at the University of Toronto and co-founder of Neighbourwoods, a project that helps neighbourhoods, school boards and churches create inventories of the trees on their properties and monitor their health and growth.

But while public support of the urban canopy grows, cities continue to cave to the powerful forces of development. Despite its lofty forest-expansion ambitions, Toronto has seen its portion of plantable space decrease in the last decade and impervious land cover increase.

We’re trying hard to drive resources to the communities that need it most.

—Maisie Hughes, vice-president of urban forestry, American Forests

“Planning topples everything,” says Puric-Mladenovic. She says that many North American cities, stuck in a 1950s mentality of “develop first and plant second,” are still building concrete jungles, like the condominium forest of CityPlace in downtown Toronto, that offer nowhere near enough green space and suburban subdivisions that amount to a mass of housing wrapped around one woodlot or baseball diamond. Puric-Mladenovic calls the practice of planting tall trees in the same path as hydro poles – necessitating the regular butchery of their limbs – emblematic.

Given the huge pressure on urban land, cities have to fully integrate, even prioritize, trees in their planning blueprints. Lots of little parks don’t cut it; Puric-Mladenovic says the best way to ensure tree health is to create green swaths, like Toronto’s ravine system, in which species and water systems connect and biodiversity flourishes. Thanks largely to their less car-centric design, European cities offer a model that combines density with impressive amounts of green space.

Help them grow

Cities also need to take maintenance seriously. Trees cause serious damage when they fall or when their roots compromise building foundations, underground waterpipes or pavement. A growing number of cities are using Lidar (light detection and ranging) data, a three-dimensional system that models individual trees rather than the canopy as a whole, to ensure that trees reach maturity, which is when they perform best: throwing the most shade and trapping exponentially more pollutants than young ones.

In defence of trees, some cities are now assigning a dollar value to their contributions. In its most recent strategic forestry plan, for instance, the City of Toronto assesses the “structural value” of its forest – defined as what it would cost to replace it – at $7 billion and estimates that it provides $28.2 million annually in ecological services (pollution removal and energy savings) while representing a carbon storage benefit of $25 million. But cost-benefit assessments don’t capture the full picture.

“You can’t just take the bean-counter view,” says Hashem Akbari, an environmental engineer at Concordia University. It’s an interesting perspective, coming from someone who deals largely in numbers and efficiencies. As co-founder of the Heat Island Group, a research lab at the University of California, Akbari has spent much of his career considering which measures – from building materials to roof construction to city planning – are most effective in reducing urban heat.

He says that trees in Canadian cities may provide energy savings of around 20% through the shade they create in summer (reducing the need for air conditioning) and the windbreak they offer in winter (insulating buildings from the cold). This benefit, he says, is more significant than their carbon performance, given that urban trees in Canada – battered by road salt and dog pee – live considerably shorter than their cousins in the wild; when they die and decompose, the carbon they sequestered is released back into the atmosphere.

Nonetheless, Akbari is unequivocally pro-tree. “There are so many aspects of the tree you can’t quantify,” he says.

Psychologist Marc Berman studies some of those unquantifiable aspects in the Environmental Neuroscience Lab he runs at the University of Chicago. His research suggests that trees go a long way toward restoring a kind of neurological balance in people living in the “arbitrary” environment of the city. Experiments conducted in his lab have shown that even brief engagements with nature – like a walk in a park – boost the brain’s capacity to focus and to remember.

The findings have profound implications for city planners and leaders. In addition to carbon, energy and pollution services, the canopy’s more subtle benefits translate directly into economic ones: improved human productivity, higher property values, reductions in healthcare costs and crime rates.

“Green space must be treated as a necessity, not an amenity,” Berman says. “There has to be a revolution in how we think about these things.”

This story is part of the Sustainable Cities section in our Spring 2024 issue. 

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Siakilo knows firsthand how immediate these issues are. When he was a child, his region would flood perhaps twice in a year. “The houses could be submerged in water. … Crops and livestock would be swept away, and you’d have to start from zero. No food, no farms, nothing to pay school fees with,” he says.

As he grew older, the floods became both more severe and more frequent: up to six or seven per year. “Yet the leadership was still saying that this was a natural phenomenon, that nothing could be done,” he says. That’s when Siakilo decided he had to leave. He went to Nairobi to study, eventually earning his doctorate in climate action at the University of Phoenix in Arizona. He has made it his life’s work to educate lay people and leaders alike, about both the challenges we face and solutions to resolve them.

Today, Siakilo is the senior climate adaptation and resilience advisor for Power Shift Africa,* a non-profit based in Nairobi. Power Shift Africa provides policy papers for leaders across Africa and around the world on what can be done to address the impacts of the changing climate. “It’s about shifting our understanding of what, literally, should power our societies,” Siakilo says. “But it’s also about shifting power dynamics in the global conversation on how to manage climate change.”

It’s unsurprising that some of the best ideas for fighting the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss come from Africa. The continent has had the least to do with creating the global climate crisis we all face, yet its people are grappling with some of the most immediate consequences. While African biodiversity and climate-adaptation initiatives encounter their fair share of obstacles and unintended outcomes, it’s also true that farmers, communities and, yes, even governments are stepping up to meet the challenges with a degree of coordination and success that others could do well to learn from.

This pragmatic approach to addressing climate issues is evident in the evolution of the Africa-led Great Green Wall Initiative, an ambitious plan to combat desertification by planting trees across the Sahel region. The original vision was for a wall 16 kilometres wide and more than 8,000 kilometres long. It was conceived as a line of trees to stop the Sahara from spreading and stretched from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east. Launched in 2007, it required the in-depth collaboration of 11 countries across a territory twice the size of Western Europe.

The initiative aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million green jobs by 2030 to support communities across the region.

The number of countries participating has grown to 30. The required budget has also soared from US$8 billion to more than US$40 billion. The need is urgent: temperatures in the Sahel are rising one and a half times faster than the average for the rest of the world, in regions where up to 82% of the population relies on rain-fed agriculture.

But cracks began to emerge in the Wall initiative’s blueprint.

Mending the great green wall

As specific species of trees either died or became invasive, policy-makers and farmers alike soon discovered that the volume of trees planted was not nearly as important as the mix and species of trees deployed, and the way in which communities chose to use them: where trees were placed, in combination with what other vegetation, what value local communities saw from the initiative (and hence whether those communities were on board to sustain the effort) all mattered. Those working on the Wall in countries such as Niger, Senegal and Mali shifted their efforts from simple tree planting to more sophisticated land regeneration: an approach that engages grassroots Indigenous knowledge, species and methods in ways that, in some countries, have measurably improved the quality of the soil over decades.

Farmers in Niger, for example, had laboured for generations under French colonial-era laws that disincentivized the planting of trees on farmland. (Trees were to be kept separate from crops and were considered the property of the government.) Over decades, the tree population sharply declined, and with it the land’s productivity. Topsoil blew away, and rainfall ran off compacted surfaces. By the early 1980s, Niger farmers were producing crop yields of 400 pounds per acre; farms in the United States, by comparison, were producing 5,600 pounds per acre (largely thanks to heavy chemical input, souped-up seeds and expensive farming equipment).

In some communities, the people turned to cultivating trees placed strategically within fields, using root stock on already-cleared land. The trees provided fuel and food and, crucially, started to improve the quality of the soil. By 2004, Smithsonian magazine reported that Niger’s Zinder region had 50 times more trees than it did in 1975. Today, the Wall has been successful in environments such as Mali, Niger and Senegal, places where it was able to build on such local knowledge and grassroots efforts. Wall coordinators link locally led, small-scale initiatives across the country to achieve much larger national goals – literally growing the Wall from the grassroots up. In Senegal, the government, via the Senegalese Agency for Reforestation, has partnered with local farmers practising regenerative agriculture. For example, the Kholy-Alpha natural reserve, in the rural community of Mboula, engages community members directly in cultivating tree nurseries and nurturing the seedlings needed to achieve planting targets each year.

Wall of greenwash?

The Great Green Wall has not been without both its challenges and its critics. African tree-planting efforts made headlines around the world just before the pandemic, when Ethiopia claimed to have planted 350 million trees on one day in July 2019, toward a claim of four billion planted that year. Achieving four billion trees planted stretches credibility: to do so would require a pace of 40 to 45 million planted per day. The BBC attempted to investigate the claim in 2019, but it’s almost impossible to independently verify the total number of saplings planted in Ethiopia, given there is no free press.

Even in places where the press is free, getting reliable data outside of formal evaluations remains challenging. As per 2014 data from the search engine Ecosia, which partnered with local groups to quantify the success of the initiative to date, the Wall initiative had planted approximately 22.3 million trees and restored 14,284 hectares of land across Burkina Faso, Senegal and Ethiopia. The BBC subsequently reported in 2017 that in Senegal alone, more than 11 million trees had been planted. More recent estimates of success of the whole initiative vary wildly, from 4% to 15% complete, as do survival rates for saplings. A 2019 World Agroforestry study found a survival rate of less than 30% in Ethiopia’s East Shewa zone, in sharp contrast with official Ethiopian government statistics that put the sapling survival rate at 83.4% and 79% for 2019 and 2020 respectively. Reforestation efforts are also hampered by the climate emergency itself: ongoing drought, in particular in Ethiopia, and other extreme weather events that limit the amount of water available to sustain such initiatives.

Regardless, a commitment to “re-greening” through strategic tree planting has since become policy across all members of the African Union. As Babacar Youm, a delegate from Senegal attending COP15 last December in Montreal, explained, “Every country in Africa now has targets to plant trees, from Nigeria to South Sudan.”

Losing the forest for the trees

Governments worldwide have seized on the idea that the rapid planting of trees at mass scale is somehow a catch-all solution to the multi-layered challenges of biodiversity depletion and climate change. In the 2019 election, Canada set itself the target of two billion trees to be planted over 10 years and is already falling behind. Canada had planted 29 million trees in its first two years, a mere 1.5% of the end goal. Obstacles to date include lack of access to land, intermittent disbursement of funding and insufficient seedlings as projects ramp up. In 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden announced plans to plant one billion trees on millions of acres of wildfire-singed federal land in addition to an earlier commitment of 1.2 billion new trees by 2030, but the Americans have also run into serious seed shortages, hampering their efforts to scale up. In the global rush to reach critical mass, the slower, building-from-the-ground-up approach that delivered success in early-adopter countries such as Niger, Senegal and Mali risks being lost.

In January 2020, the Kenyan government evicted 30,000 people from the forest in the name of conservation. “The government was trying to conserve the Mau Forest,” Siakilo explains. “Yet the Ogiek people have been residing there as long as humanity has existed.” Some Ogiek have since partnered with the Kenya Water Towers Agency, the entity leading regeneration efforts, to grow seedlings for the reforestation efforts.

Meanwhile, in Tanzania, a government policy intended to support conservation efforts sparked violent protests in June 2022, when officials started moving the semi-nomadic Maasai people from the Ngorongoro Crater conservation area. The government contended that the expanding Maasai population had become a threat to the habitat; UN experts feared the relocations could cause “irreparable harm to the Maasai pastoralists,” as reported by France 24.

“If we are to do re-greening,” says Siakilo, “the key question to ask is ‘For whom is this project?’ The moment you ask that question you are thinking about justice, fairness, equity, inclusion – bringing on board every stakeholder.”

There’s also another issue: forests are dark, reducing reflectivity and absorbing heat. This quality, some scientists believe, could potentially undermine or even negate the carbon-sequestration benefits that planting trees at scale brings. The re-greening must be done in a way that genuinely restores the local habitat.

Such challenges aside, experts do agree that large swathes of arable land have been regenerated through Great Green Wall efforts. In Ethiopia, a report from the World Bank–affiliated Independent Evaluation Group found that Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative, its offshoot of the Wall, had regenerated 45 watersheds. As per the report, 98% of the targets that the project set in terms of improved land management had been met. Target areas recorded an increase on average of approximately 5% in vegetation cover and moisture retention over a minimum seven-year period.

Forest financing done right

So, how to finance the kind of locally led re-greening at the scale needed?

The loss-and-damage fund agreement reached by negotiators at the COP27 climate summit in the fall of 2022 will ask Global North countries, which have contributed the most to the climate problem while generating great wealth from the burning of fossil fuels, to essentially provide funding to Global South countries to mitigate climate “loss and damage.” That funding enables Global South governments to leave fossil fuels in the ground while engaging in biodiversity cultivation, including tree-planting work at scale.

At press time, the UN confirmed that the committee set up to deliberate over the fund’s disbursement was on track to meet at the end of March, as announced at COP27, but did not respond to questions about how much funding had in fact been committed. Whether states actually step up to provide funding will have direct impacts on the capacity of some of the more fragile countries to achieve re-greening targets.

Take South Sudan, whose target is to plant one million trees by 2027. As Lwanga Tiba Charles, South Sudan’s assistant director for biodiversity in the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, said at COP15 in Montreal last December, “We will engage village communities across all 10 South Sudanese states to cultivate local species of seedlings in community nurseries.” On designated planting days, everyone will participate. South Sudan’s work is to be funded by the Global Climate Fund, a separate climate fund established in Seoul in 2010, at an estimated cost of under US$5 million.

The cost, complexity and unintended consequences of hastily executed tree-planting initiatives are sobering for those looking to Africa’s experience for lessons to regenerate the biosphere and blunt the impact of climate change. Yet Senegal, Mali, Niger and Ethiopia have also been able to restore sizeable swathes of arable land and regenerate watersheds. And this has been achieved in some of the most cash-poor, politically fragile states on the planet.

In light of these achievements, the global community needs to pay closer attention to the Great Green Wall and invest in Africa-led initiatives that have delivered measurable results for some of the most vulnerable on Earth. After all, as Alison Loat, the managing director for sustainable investment and innovation at OPTrust puts it, “What’s at stake isn’t the future of the planet. What’s at stake is the future of humanity.” Who better to lead that effort than the only continent that, to date, has built a pan-continental consensus on how best to combat climate change – and delivered a track record of success.

*Journalists for Human Rights partners with Power Shift Africa on climate media development work. 

Rachel Pulfer is the executive director of Journalists for Human Rights.

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Two of Uncle David’s axioms replay in my head on a regular basis:

“It’s a losing battle, but then those are the only ones worth fighting.”

“Never underestimate the ability of powerful people to justify their actions.”

When we look at the past 50 years, from the Vietnam War to our upside-down tax system (where those who have the most often pay the least in terms of their effective rates), it’s hard to argue, on the whole, that he was wrong.

But it’s also fair to say we are no longer living in usual times. The COVID crisis is a reminder of the power of civilization to rapidly address existential challenges when we flex our collective muscle.

The pandemic pause has allowed room to reflect on the kind of society we want. Do we want to continue our zombie-like march toward torching the only home we have? Is it really inevitable that we must continue to prop up the mighty with tax giveaways and handouts while we undervalue the vulnerable people and planet that we need the most?

By 2030, Canada could create more than five million quality job-years of employment by greening the power grid, electrifying transport and upgrading our homes and workplaces to be more comfortable, flood resilient and cheaper to run, saving Canadians $39 billion per year at the pumps and on heating and power bills by 2030 (in today’s dollars). We could also help protect the livelihoods of many others, including by supporting farmers to adopt practices and technologies for restoring the soil while paying them fairly for the ecosystem services they provide, paying young people fairly to plant billions of trees, and supporting Indigenous communities as sustainable economy leaders.

By 2030, we could own large parts of the clean-economy podium. We have all the ingredients to create Canadian champions in fast-growing industries of the future, including lightweight bitumen-based carbon fibres, renewable jet fuels, green hydrogen, batteries and electric vehicles (see our green economy vision board on p. 34).

In the wake of the COVID crisis, this is all within reach if we choose to build back better by making these job-rich themes a priority in the federal government’s stimulus and recovery packages.

The people who control the budgets will ask, how can we afford it? An equally valid question is how can we afford not to do it?

A big part of the explanation is traceable to Uncle David’s two axioms. We cannot afford to listen to the voices that say we just need to get back to doing what we were doing.

There is no going back. Now is the time to move forward.

That, at least, is my hope, but what happens will not be up to me.

It will come down to the human condition and how it responds to the current crisis. Will we be guided by fear or hope?

On this question, I am reminded of Uncle David again. Two of his sons played roles in the 1963 movie Lord of the Flies, based on the dystopian William Golding novel that reveals the rot of fear that dominates the human condition.

Lord of the Flies was fiction. In real life, it was a different story. In 1965, six restless boys set sail from the South Pacific island of Tonga, were hit by a storm and ended up shipwrecked on a desert island for 15 months. When they were finally found, rather than the dystopian situation Golding envisioned, the boys were getting along just fine, having set up a commune with a food garden, gym, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent communally tended fire.

It will also take a community to overcome the forces of the status quo.

Some have been dismissive of the idea of a just green recovery.

But they may be missing the point. The just part of a green recovery is not an add-on, but an essential condition for creating the big-tent coalition required to dislodge the forces of inertia. As a practical matter, it’s hard to see how the current “shecession” (women are bearing the brunt of the recession) gets addressed without some radical improvements in supports for affordable childcare, greatly improved eldercare and a living wage.

The best chance we have for the forces of hope to prevail is by marrying the green and just fires that burn bright in all our bellies, from which hope springs eternal.

Toby Heaps is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Corporate Knights. 

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That simple, powerful message came out of the World Economic Forum in January, as billionaires and high-ranking politicians gathered to discuss ways to keep our increasingly unstable climate from becoming unlivable.

Think COVID-19 is bad? In many ways, the current pandemic is a taste of what’s to come if we don’t dramatically reduce atmospheric CO2 emissions over the next 30 years. COVID-19 may have temporarily pushed talk of climate action to the margins, but the risks of a warming world remain.

Which brings us back to trees. Trees are humanity’s greatest allies in the fight against climate change, so when planting a trillion of them becomes a call to action for government leaders and multibillionaires, we can only hope they’ll follow through – even in a world currently seized by crisis. That includes Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s own pledge to plant two billion trees over the next decade.

The reality is that our forests and woodlands are already under extreme stress, whether as a result of deforestation or wildfires and disease made worse by climate change. One need only look to the recent devastation in Australia, and earlier wildfires in Alberta and California, to see we have a big problem.

In the journal Science last summer, researchers estimated that there’s room on this planet – if we exclude existing urban and agricultural areas – to restore nearly a billion hectares of tree canopy. Doing so, they calculated, could store more than 200 gigatonnes of carbon, or about a quarter of the carbon currently in our atmosphere in the form of heat-trapping gases like CO2 and methane.

Put another way, it would be like removing two-thirds of the CO2 humans have dumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. “This highlights global tree restoration as one of the most effective carbon drawdown solutions to date,” the researchers wrote.

Effective, yes, but let’s not underestimate the challenge.

Tree planting isn’t as simple as people might think. Tree planters, often summer students, experience a 25% injury rate, among the highest of almost any industry. Increasingly, these students are exposed to ticks and mosquitos that carry diseases like Lyme and West Nile virus.

Tree planting companies also require a lot of labour, as well as the infrastructure required to support it. The camps set up to support workers need kitchen trailers, showers, sleeping tents, portable toilets, drinking water, fuel, first aid rooms and other amenities – even satellite internet – and that comes at a significant cost.

There’s also a big shortage of labour most years because of the difficult nature of the job. Hauling around bags loaded with seedlings and constantly squatting in the sun while digging with a shovel is exhausting work, made worse by the swarms of blackflies and mosquitoes that make DEET your best friend.

It’s for this reason that folks like Bryce Jones, co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based Flash Forest, are working hard to develop new approaches to tree planting. Jones says all current reforestation efforts fall radically short of the true need. “If the tree-planting targets announced by federal governments in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand and Australia are going to be met, innovation will be necessary.”

Flash Forest, for example, is betting that drones will be an essential part of the solution. The company uses advanced 3D mapping technology and an enhanced fleet of aerial drones to plant trees 10 times faster than conventional approaches and at one-fifth the cost.

Each of its drones is operated by a pilot from the ground and equipped with a pneumatic firing device that shoots seed pods into the soil. The pods are made up of germinated seeds surrounded by a biodegradable, moisture-retaining casing that contains everything the seeds need to flourish, including beneficial acids, nutrients and fungi that promote healthy growth.

And each drone can carry a mix of pods, assuring that multiple types of native trees are planted, rather than monocultures that threaten biodiversity.

But it’s the numbers that are most compelling. With conventional tree planting, one person working 10-hour days could theoretically plant seven million trees over the course of a decade. To hit a trillion trees would require 143,000 people working non-stop – people who need to be put up in camps, fed and paid.

Alternatively, the same goal could be reached using just 2,800 aerial drones, each operated by a single pilot driving around in a pickup truck. How’s that for productivity in the age of self-isolation?

This example highlights the crucial role that automation, robotics, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies will need to play to achieve the kind of greenhouse gas reductions needed to keep our climate livable.

Ambitious targets are welcome, but they’ll be meaningless unless we can properly harness the power of machines to make up for time that humanity has wasted.

Tyler Hamilton works with cleantech companies across Canada as an advisor with the non-profit MaRS Discovery District in Toronto. He is also on the board of the Ontario Clean Technology Industry Association.

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But since images of wildfires ravaging the Amazon rainforest captured global hearts and minds, efforts to reforest the planet have taken centre stage. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg began urging political leaders in Canada and around the globe to look to tree planting as part of a Natural Climate Solutions campaign to tackle global heating. Adding fuel to the tree-planting fire, a Swiss study published in the journal Science made waves when it concluded that planting 1.2 trillion trees worldwide could absorb and store an astonishing 205 gigatonnes – effectively removing two-thirds of all human-made carbon from the atmosphere, once those trees fully mature.

Keeping a trillion young trees alive all the way to maturity in the face of climate-change-aggravated droughts, wildfires and pests, as well as human pressures, will be an enormous challenge. As well, the Guardian’s George Monbiot (a founder of the Natural Climate Solutions campaign) recently cautioned that “in many places rewilding, or natural regeneration – allowing trees to seed and spread themselves – is much faster and more effective, and tends to produce far richer habitats.”

Regardless, the wave of mass tree-planting pledges has begun. Here’s a sampling of the latest initiatives:

• Ireland plans to plant 22 million trees every year for the next 20 years, totalling 440 million trees.

• New Zealand aims to plant a billion trees by 2028.

• A record-breaking 350 million trees were reportedly planted on a single day in July in Ethiopia, as part of a push to plant four billion trees there by October.

• Pakistan has committed to planting 10 billion trees over the next five to eight years.

• More than 20 African countries are in the midst of planting a Great Green Wall, with plans to reforest 247 million acres of degraded land.

• In Canada, the federal Liberal Party promised, if re-elected, to use revenues from the Trans Mountain Pipeline to pay for two billion trees to be planted.

Not that tree planting should negate efforts to decarbonize the economy, but as Swiss researcher Jean-François Bastin says, “Governments must now factor [tree restoration] into their national strategies.”

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