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China Planted 78 Billion New Trees, and Seriously Messed Up Its Water Cycle
(www.popularmechanics.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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Wait.... 78 Billion trees. As in with a 'b' billion? In all seriousness, how?
In Estonia we plant about 20-40 millions of trees every year.
RMK ( State Forest Management Center) alone plants about 20-25 million trees every year.
And we are nation with 1,3 million people. So for China that number over the years isn’t big at all.
I always laugh when in the western news there is some organization, what makes big words that they planted 2 million trees and if that is something of a big achivments what should be boasted around the news.
I should check out Estonia
It's since 1980, they've had almost half a century to do it.
That's still 1,695,652,173 trees per year (78,000,000,000/46 years).
"In all seriousness, how?"
The us plants about 2.3 trillion corn plants per year. 25,000 per acre, 95,000,000 acres. Considering they plant 68,000,000 trees per year just for paper, in the US, the numbers aren't shocking. Worldwide tree nurseries probably dwarf that 1.6 billion, maybe.
68 million is a pretty far cry from 1,695 million.
But the US plants around 1.3 billion a year, so China's number isn't shocking
That's still over a billion trees a year. Actually that's over 1,500,000,000 trees a year. Again...HOW?
And this begs a side question. Out of those 78 Billion trees, how many are alive now?
Just a matter of scale. Every seventh person lives in China.
Or to recontextualize: The article talks about a time span of around 45 years. That's around 1.7 billion trees. Remember, that's an english (short) billion, 1700 million. (In other languages a billion is a million millions, and not just a thousand millions.)
If a worker can plant 20 trees a day and works 200 days a year, that means around half a million people are more than enough to do it. In a country with around 1400 million people, that's 0.035% of the population, or roughly one in 3000 people.
Suddenly, it's not all that crazy anymore.
Are we talking 10 to the 9th power or the 12th?
I also did some reading up on this. I live in British Columbia and reforestation is a big deal. Apparently a tree planter can plant 2,000 seedlings a day. More if the terrain is good and they're experienced. So yeah, I can see it now.
Though I still wonder about the survival rate of the plantings, but How question is indeed answered.
Popular Mechanics is US-based, so they use short billions: 1bio = 1 000 000 000.
You are right, long billions (1bio = 1 000 000 000 000) would be a lot more. Though even that would still be possible, but then ~35% of the chinese population would have to be employed in planting trees.
Yes, I was shocked too. But in 1949 apparently 8.6% of the country was forested; in 2022 it was 24%.
In 2005 they launched the "Greening China" initiative to plant 13 Trillion (yes Trillion with a T) trees in 10 years. They didn't succeed but in 2021 the People's Daily claimed 78.1bn trees planted in 40 years Link.
However - China is known for inflating statistics to suit the communist party's own ends, and the People's Daily is part of the country's propaganda system. It's probably far less than 78bn, and that figure doesn't count replants and commerically logged trees. But it seems that whatever the figure there really has been a concerted long term reforestation effort in China.
There are around 3 trillion trees on earth, so planting another 13 trillion is quite ambitious