Trees & reforestation

Forests absorb carbon, shelter wildlife, and anchor watersheds — yet billions of trees have been lost to logging and land conversion. This archive tracks the science, policy, and community efforts driving reforestation forward, from Indigenous-led land restoration to large-scale planting programs showing measurable results.

Silhouette of baobob trees, for article on Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Seeds of 19 African tree species added to Svalbard Global Seed Vault

By / / Good News For Humankind

Seeds from 19 African tree species just made it into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the icy archive tucked into Norwegian permafrost that now safeguards 1.3 million seed samples from around the world. Thirteen of the newly deposited species are native to Africa, including the beloved baobab and Faidherbia albida, a quietly miraculous tree that fixes nitrogen, feeds livestock, shades crops, and offers food during the dry season. Scientists gathered the seeds alongside Indigenous groups and local seed networks, capturing genetic variations shaped by generations of stewardship. It’s a small, hopeful act of foresight: as forests face mounting pressure worldwide, preserving this living diversity — and honoring the communities who cultivated it — gives future restoration efforts a fighting chance.

Rainforest canopy, for article on tropical forest reserve

The Democratic Republic of Congo to create the Earth’s largest protected tropical forest reserve

By / / Good News For Humankind

The Democratic Republic of Congo just passed legislation protecting 540,000 square kilometers of tropical forest — an area the size of France, and now the largest protected tropical forest reserve on Earth. At its heart is the Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor, which aims to create 500,000 jobs by linking renewable energy hubs, sustainable farming, and the communities that depend on the forest. The model is already working at smaller scale inside Virunga National Park, where a similar partnership has generated over 21,000 jobs in five years — 11% of them held by people who left armed militias. It’s a rare plan that treats conservation, poverty, and peace as the same problem, offering a blueprint the world badly needs.

Green plant sprout in cracked soil, for article on Great Green Wall

China completes historic 1,800-mile “Great Green Wall”

By / / Good News For Humankind

China’s Great Green Wall has helped lift forest cover from under 10% in 1949 to nearly a quarter of the country’s land today, across roughly 1,800 miles of arid north. In dunes near Hongshui village, 78-year-old farmer Wang Tianchang and his family have spent four decades planting sweetvetch shrubs in tidy squares — a technique locals call “holding down the sand” — alongside pines and blue spruces that now shield their fields. Tens of thousands of volunteers join each planting season, and species choices have grown sharper after decades of trial and error. The honest picture includes monoculture missteps and stubborn sandstorms, but Africa’s own Great Green Wall is drawing explicit inspiration — proof that patient, place-based restoration can ripple far beyond where the first seedlings go in.

Brazil renews plan to restore 30 million acres of degraded land

By / / Good News For Humankind

Brazil’s new restoration plan sets out to revive 12 million hectares of degraded land — about half the size of the United Kingdom — by 2030. Launched at the COP16 biodiversity summit, Planaveg 2.0 leans on a hopeful reality: 5.6 million hectares in the Amazon are already regrowing on their own, simply because clearing has stopped. The rest will take real work, including planting and stronger compliance from private landowners, who hold roughly three-quarters of the targeted land. In a country home to up to 18% of the world’s known species, even partial success would ripple far beyond its borders — a reminder that protecting biodiversity globally runs straight through the forests and farms of Brazil.

A person preparing for planting the plant, for article on Colombian Amazon restoration

Campesinos plant nearly a million trees in deforestation hotspot in the Colombian Amazon

By / / Good News For Humankind

More than 700 campesino families in the Colombian Amazon have planted nearly a million native trees across former cattle pasture, transforming one of the country’s worst deforestation hotspots into recovering forest. In just four months, families across the Cuemaní region planted over 984,000 trees and palms — and tapirs, deer, and parrots that had disappeared with the chainsaws are already coming back. Teenagers who joined botanical surveys alongside scientists discovered they could earn a living as local forest experts, with some now pursuing degrees in agroforestry. What makes this remarkable isn’t just the scale, but the model: when the people who once cleared the land become its protectors, restoration starts to hold — a lesson echoing across the Amazon and beyond.

Aral Sea time lapse 1989 2014, for article on Aral Sea afforestation

Uzbekistan plants millions of acres of forest where the Aral Sea once lay

By / / Good News For Humankind

Aral Sea afforestation has covered 1.7 million hectares of dried lakebed with saxaul trees and other desert-tolerant plants over the past five years, transforming what was once the world’s fourth-largest lake into a slowly recovering landscape. The work is led on the ground by Karakalpak communities, where women gather seeds each autumn and men join planting crews through the winter. A single mature saxaul shrub can hold back several tons of moving sand, shielding nearby towns from the toxic dust storms that have driven respiratory illness for decades. It’s an imperfect, weather-dependent effort — but a hopeful model for how nature-based restoration can heal landscapes that seemed beyond saving.

Young trees, for article on African reforestation

The TREES program has planted tens of millions of trees across Africa since 2015

By / / Good News For Humankind

Reforestation done right looks less like a planting day and more like a four-year partnership with farmers — and the TREES program has quietly restored more than 41,000 hectares across nine African countries, an area roughly seven times the size of Manhattan. Instead of dropping seeds on remote land, TREES helps smallholder families build “forest gardens” of about 5,800 trees per hectare, weaving in fruit orchards, food crops, and windbreaks that feed households and generate a market surplus. In Kenya’s Kesouma region alone, 17,000 farmers have joined in. Earlier this year, the UN named it a World Restoration Flagship — a reminder that the most durable climate work tends to be the kind that pays the people doing it.

Dominican Republic forested landscape, for article on Plan Yaque land restoration

The Dominican Republic reforests a fifth of the country in 10 years

By / / Good News For Humankind

The Dominican Republic restored 18% of its territory in a single decade — not through sweeping mandates, but through conversations with farmers, one at a time. Plan Yaque, a coalition of 30 NGOs and government agencies, launched in 2009 with a simple premise: help landowners see trees as a path to water security and steadier farm income. Project leaders traveled farm by farm, and as restored hillsides began holding water and reviving streams, neighbors became the project’s most persuasive advocates. The result is one of the largest land recoveries in the Western Hemisphere this century — and a reminder that some of the most durable environmental wins come from trust, not enforcement.

Mangrove forest, for article on Pakistan mangrove restoration

Pakistan has expanded mangroves nearly threefold between 1986 and 2020

By / / Good News For Humankind

Pakistan’s mangrove forests have nearly tripled since 1986, growing from about 48,000 hectares to 144,000 hectares — a striking reversal of the global pattern of mangrove loss. Most of that expansion sits in the Indus Delta, where roughly 100,000 people depend on healthy mangroves for fishing livelihoods. The recovery has been driven by an unusual mix: provincial forest departments, international scientific partnerships, carbon credit financing, and fishing villages whose residents work as nursery hands and patrol against illegal cutting. In one coastal town, a single nursery holds 50,000 saplings ready for planting. As coastlines worldwide face rising seas and intensifying storms, Pakistan’s quietly persistent restoration offers a real-world template for what sustained, community-rooted conservation can achieve.

Amazon River Rainforest, for article on Amazon deforestation

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon fell by nearly 50% in 2023 compared to 2022

By / / Good News For Humankind

Amazon deforestation in Brazil dropped by nearly half in 2023, with satellite data showing 5,153 square kilometers cleared compared to 10,278 the year before. Environment Minister Marina Silva credited the turnaround to a revitalized enforcement agency, Ibama, whose inspectors have been back in the field issuing fines and dismantling illegal logging networks. President Lula has pledged to end Amazon deforestation entirely by 2030, calling this year’s numbers a first step. The shift matters far beyond Brazil’s borders: roughly 60% of the rainforest sits within the country, and scientists warn the ecosystem is approaching a tipping point. It’s a hopeful reminder that political will, paired with real enforcement, can change a forest’s trajectory in a single year.