How Many Trees Are Planted Each Year?

Planting trees and restoring forests is one of the oldest methods for fighting climate change. Over the course of only hundreds of years, human logging operations have reduced the number of trees on the planet by trillions. As more and more people come to live on our planet, the amount of space we need to coexist also increases, but as is, we are cutting down far too many trees for sustainable living.

Every year, billions of trees are cut down; it’s part of the reason that Boomhi contributes to reversing the trend, by planting a tree for every pair of socks sold, and by making those socks from recycled and repurposed plastic. Already, we have planted thousands of trees and have committed to planting thousands more—but how many trees are planted each year across the world?

It’s hard to estimate the “true” number of trees planted each year, in part because the number is so high—the United Nations’ Billion Tree Campaign, for example, estimated that its projects had planted billions of trees between 2006 and 2015, but points out that the number is almost certainly an exaggeration, because of low cyber security protocols from when the program launched in 2006.

We see something similar with government pledges—often, countries and governments pledge planting a certain number of trees over several years, but these can differ from results on the ground. It is much easier, after all, to report a plan than a result.

The Trillion Tree Campaign is one of the largest initiatives in the world for planting trees; hundreds of projects around the globe go through this organization to receive publicity, funding, and transparency for their reforestation efforts. They estimate that, between 2000 and 2012, 80 million hectares of forest were planted through their projects, which comes to 66,500 square kilometers of forest every year.

They report an even more specific number too: between 2006 and 2018, they estimate nearly fourteen billion trees planted, an average of around 1.15 billion per year. But even though the Trillion Tree Campaign is affiliated with the United Nations, they cannot account for every tree planted in the world, nor every project!

So we don’t have an exact answer for how many trees are planted each year, though we know the number is in excess of one billion. What’s unfortunate is that the number of trees being cut down each year is also in the billions—some estimates put the number as high as eight billion trees lost each year, which means we still have a lot of work to do!

This is why Boomhi exists, and why we’re so proud of the work we do—because restoring forests is important, and we are proud to contribute to the global effort! To date, Boomhi has planted 300,000 trees thanks to your contributions! For every pair of socks sold, we proudly plant a tree, and thanks to our collaborations with AtlasGO and The Orca Project, more and more trees are going into the ground through One Tree Planted to benefit lives and communities around the world.

Our goal is to have many more trees planted in 2022, and we are well on our way already. We can make a difference together this year by adding to the number of trees planted around the world every year… and we’re going to!