[kajumix]

it'll take roughly 1.5 million mature trees to sequester 315,000 metric tons of CO2 over 10 years. The "Billion Tree Tsunami" in Pakistan aimed to plant a billion trees from 2014-2017 and surpassed its goal. Similarly, India set a record in 2016 by planting more than 66 million trees in a single day.

[rcme]

Wow 315,000 metric tons. That’s the yearly CO2 output of 21,000 Americans!

[bcrosby95]

Yeah, tree planting is mostly feel good unsustainable crap. People keep trying to get around this problem without taking a hit to lifestyle, but I don't see how that happens.

[kajumix]

It's also the goal of Microsoft in this project

[mc32]

How many will survive and make it to maturity? Planting saplings is easy. Having them mature is more difficult.

[tclancy]

There's also a question of how good these plans are for the ecosystem as they tend to plant all the same tree in tight spaces so they wind up competing for resources and driving out other parts of the system.

[abdullahkhalids]

I think surveys for five years survival are still being done, but an earlier survey by WWF found 70-85% survival rates for earlier stages in the life of the trees [1].

Regarding your point, yes, there is a lot of problems in the project with monocultures being planted, especially comprising non-local ones. This is a complex political problem because you want to incentivize planting, but cost of planting "multi"-cultures is much higher.

[1] https://d2ouvy59p0dg6k.cloudfront.net/downloads/btap_monitor...

[abdullahkhalids]

Pakistan actually went for Ten Billion trees [1] next. This one is going slower, because of a variety of political and scientific reasons but there is still quite a lot of progress.

[1] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/pakistans-ten-bi...

[czrn]

1 billion trees over 3 years is not much for such a big country. Much smaller Poland has managed forests and plants 500 million trees a year.