When Ethiopia announced on July 29, 2019, that citizens had planted more than 353 million seedlings in 12 hours, foresters and farm advisers warned that what was planted and what survived mattered more than the count.
Residents plant seedlings along a ridge of soil in Konso, southern Ethiopia, on World Environment Day in June 2012. (Trees for the Future / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0) [file photo]
The planting day was the centrepiece of the Green Legacy campaign launched by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, which aimed to plant about 4 billion trees during the 2019 rainy season. The government gave a precise total of 353,633,660 seedlings and promoted the day as a Guinness World Record attempt, beating the record India set in 2017, when about 1.5 million volunteers planted 66 million trees in 12 hours, CNN reported. Guinness World Records later told the BBC it had not received any evidence.
Writing for Global Voices in August 2019, Sheila Halder, farm systems coordinator at the British charity Send a Cow, called the effort an incredible achievement but noted that saplings take years to mature and reach their full carbon-capturing potential. During that time, she wrote, they must be protected from grazing, cutting and drought, while mature forests also need protecting.
Species choice was the second test. Ethiopia has relied on eucalyptus, native to Australia, since the end of the 19th century, when it was brought in to supply fuel and building poles for a growing Addis Ababa. More than a dozen eucalyptus species have since been planted. They grow fast, but the commonly used species draw heavily on groundwater, worsen soil erosion and strip nutrients from the soil, Halder wrote.
The 2019 campaign included indigenous species as well as eucalyptus and fruit trees such as avocado, which she saw as a shift away from simply planting more eucalyptus. She argued that non-native species can still make sense when chosen for a purpose: the Central American shrub calliandra produces high-protein fodder in East Africa, and coppiced eucalyptus gives a renewable supply of firewood.
Her charity encourages smallholders to plant multi-purpose trees that give fruit to eat or sell as well as firewood or nitrogen for the soil, so that farmers have reasons to keep them alive. She also pointed out that Ethiopia’s peatlands and highland grasslands store carbon too and need protecting alongside forests.
Counting what survived proved difficult. The BBC reported in December 2019 that the only planting figures came from the government itself, which said just over 3.5 billion trees had been planted between June and August, and that satellite imagery could not reliably pick out young saplings. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said in 2020 that 84 percent of the seedlings had survived; no independent national audit has been published.
Local records tell a more uneven story. A 2025 study of Gubalafto district in North Wollo, published in Discover Environment, found that seedling survival there averaged 39.8 percent between 2019 and 2024, with only about 12 percent of the 2019 plantings surviving. Woodland in the district grew, the authors found, but they pointed to poor aftercare and the post-2020 war as reasons many seedlings did not take hold. Eucalyptus remained among the most commonly planted species.
Sources: Global Voices: “Mass tree-planting in Ethiopia broke world records, but its impact will take time” by Sheila Halder (Aug. 30, 2019), CNN: “Ethiopia plants more than 350 million trees in 12 hours” (July 29, 2019), BBC News: “Did Ethiopia plant four billion trees this year?” (Dec. 2019), Discover Environment: “Evaluating the impact of Ethiopia’s green legacy initiative on land use/cover change in Gubalafto district” (2025), Ethiopian Monitor: “Upto 84% of Tree Seedlings Planted Last Year Grown: PM Abiy” (May 18, 2020)