A reforestation program operating across nine African countries has quietly become one of the most effective land restoration efforts on the planet. The TREES (Trees for the Future) program, founded in 2015, has planted tens of millions of trees annually and restored more than 41,000 hectares of degraded land — an area roughly seven times the size of Manhattan. In early 2024 C.E., the United Nations Environment Programme recognized TREES with its World Restoration Flagship designation, one of the organization’s highest honors for ecological recovery work.
At a glance
- Forest gardens: Rather than planting uniform tree species, TREES supports smallholder farmers in creating biodiverse plots that include food crops, fruit orchards, agroforestry trees, and protective perimeter species — all on a single hectare.
- Land restoration: Since 2015 C.E., the program has worked in Senegal, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya, and five other countries, helping farmers replace barren monocultures with living ecosystems that improve soil health and family nutrition.
- Smallholder farmers: In the Kesouma region on the edge of Lake Victoria in western Kenya alone, TREES has supported 17,000 smallholder farmers with training, seeds, tools, and monthly stipends for lead farmers who coordinate local groups.
Why forest gardens work where tree-planting campaigns often fail
Mass tree-planting initiatives have a troubled track record. A 2019 C.E. study that claimed planting a trillion trees could solve the climate crisis was later criticized as unrealistic. Governments from Kenya to Brazil have launched high-profile planting days that generate headlines but little lasting canopy — seeds go unwatered, saplings go unprotected, and without follow-up, most die.
TREES takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of drop-seeding remote terrain or staging one-time planting events, it works directly with farming families over four years, embedding technicians in communities and tying ecological outcomes to economic ones. Farmers are not asked to sacrifice income for trees. They are shown how trees increase it.
At Kesouma, individual plots of around one hectare are structured with clear purpose. The outer edge holds three rows of Acacia polyacantha — white thorn — acting as a windbreak and protective wall. Inside that sits a belt of fast-growing agroforestry species that provide firewood and animal fodder. At the center are vegetable gardens and orchards of mangoes, avocados, oranges, and apples. Each plot contains roughly 5,800 trees of multiple varieties. The design feeds a family and generates a small market surplus.
The Great Green Wall and a billion-tree goal
TREES is also contributing to the African Union’s Great Green Wall initiative, an ambitious plan to grow an 8,000-kilometer belt of vegetation across the Sahel — the semi-arid strip of land south of the Sahara that is steadily losing ground to desertification. The Great Green Wall, if completed, would be the largest natural structure on Earth. Progress has been slow, but programs like TREES offer a community-rooted model that larger infrastructure efforts can learn from.
By 2030 C.E., TREES aims to create 230,000 jobs and plant one billion trees across its operating countries. Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, said at the time of the World Restoration Flagship announcement that the program is “reversing decades of ecosystem degradation, especially across the Sahel, pushing back desertification, increasing climate resilience and improving the wellbeing of farmers and their communities.”
Carbon credits and the University of Nairobi partnership
In one pilot area in the Lake Victoria basin, participating farmers are earning additional income through carbon credits issued by U.S. firm Catona Climate, based on measured gains in soil organic carbon. Soil sampling and verification is handled by researchers from the University of Nairobi and the Wangari Maathai Institute of Peace and Environmental Studies — named after the Kenyan Nobel laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, who spent decades proving that rural women planting trees could reverse deforestation and build community resilience simultaneously.
Vincent Mainga, Kenya director of TREES, told reporters the program would scale rapidly following its UNEP recognition. “This model is very easy to adopt,” he said. “We work with the farmers for four years. After that, they can understand all the components and they can use what they learn from our technicians to produce thriving farmlands, usually with a surplus. It is self-sustaining.”
The limits of what restoration can do
No restoration program, however effective, can fully replace primary forest. The ecological functions that old-growth forest provides — carbon storage accumulated over centuries, deep water cycling, complex biodiversity — cannot be rebuilt in a decade of new plantings. Kenya itself has lost 11% of its tree cover since 2000 C.E., despite multiple national campaigns, and a recently lifted logging ban raises new concerns about near-term gains being reversed.
TREES does not claim to solve deforestation. What it does is meet degraded land where it is, and give farming families both the tools and the financial reasons to bring that land back to life. In a region where a quarter of the world’s population will live within a generation, that is not a small thing.
Read more
For more on this story, see: The Guardian
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights: 160 million hectares recognized ahead of COP30
- Ghana establishes a new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on reforestation
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