Niku Argane farms a steep hillside in Ethiopia's semi-mountainous Gurage Zone, where years of flooding have carved deep gullies through the soil. The 32-year-old's land once produced enough barley and potatoes to feed his wife and four children, with a surplus left over for the market. But the rains have grown heavier, the topsoil has washed away, and drought has made what remains harder to cultivate. "We have never stopped farming, but our production declined because of land degradation," he said from his farm in Ambele Kebele.
Argane's story is Ethiopia's story in miniature — and it explains why the country has embarked on one of the largest environmental restoration campaigns in human history. This year, he planted 80 tree seedlings on his farmland and another 50 in a communal area. Multiply him by tens of millions, and you get the staggering arithmetic of the Green Legacy Initiative: more than 47 billion seedlings planted in just seven years, with an official target of 50 billion by 2030.
How a forested country lost its trees
The scale of Ethiopia's loss is hard to overstate. In the early 20th century, forests covered an estimated 35 to 40 percent of the country. Its cool, fertile highlands were green, forested country. But as the population grew and settlements spread, trees were cleared for farming, grazing, fuel, and construction. As soils lost fertility, cultivation crept onto ever more marginal land — steep slopes where tillage, stripped of protective vegetation, let rain sluice the fertile topsoil into rivers and reservoirs. By 1989, forest cover was estimated at less than 3 percent, and Ethiopia's highlands were losing roughly one billion metric tons of topsoil every year.
The loss of roots and canopy made the land ferociously vulnerable. Without tree cover to hold soil and shade the ground, heavier downpours wash fields away while droughts dry the land out faster. Climate change is compounding both effects. Ethiopia now ranks among the countries most exposed to its consequences. Land degradation costs the country an estimated $4.3 billion a year in smaller harvests and lost income. With more than 100 million Ethiopians depending on agriculture for their livelihoods, the fallout is not only environmental — in 2024, an estimated 15.8 million Ethiopians, around 12 percent of the population, needed food assistance, and climate shocks are among the biggest drivers of that hunger.
The Green Legacy machine
The repair work did not begin yesterday. After the devastating droughts and famines of the 1970s and 1980s, Ethiopia's government and international donors invested heavily in soil and water conservation — excluding livestock from worn-out land, planting trees, and building terraces and check dams, small rock-and-log barriers that slow rainwater in gullies. By the 2000s, restoration was operating at increasing scale.
What changed in 2019 was politics. The government turned tree-planting into a national campaign, the Green Legacy Initiative, mobilising farmers, public servants, schools, and religious organisations, and distributing free seedlings nationwide. In 2024, it went further, establishing the Green Legacy and Landscape Restoration Special Fund and committing 0.5 to 1 percent of the annual federal budget — roughly $73 million to $145 million — to restoring landscapes. That is an extraordinary commitment for a low-income country, and development experts credit the ambition of the programme with helping Ethiopia win the honour of hosting next year's United Nations climate conference, a global stage on which to showcase its greening.
The numbers defy easy comprehension. This August, 26.6 million Ethiopians planted 800 million tree seedlings in a single day, according to government figures, beating the previous year's tally of 714.7 million. One of the volunteers, Yeshihareg Teferi, travelled from her home in Addis Ababa at sunrise to dig holes in rain-soaked mud for the fifth consecutive year, this time choosing juniper after previously planting indigenous species like African wild olive and African fern pine. "We have a responsibility to ensure future generations inherit a green and fertile environment, rather than barren land," she said.
The hard question: survival
Planting a seedling is the easy part. Keeping it alive is where reforestation campaigns usually fail. A 2022 study of 176 reforestation projects across Asia found that around half of planted trees did not survive five years. Aad Kessler, a researcher at the Netherlands' Wageningen University, puts the odds bluntly: "Reforestation is one of the most difficult things you can imagine. It almost always fails — but this is so big that even if 30 percent of the trees survive, it's still huge."
The survival question divides experts who otherwise agree on the goal. Emiru Birhane Hizikias, an Ethiopian restoration ecologist at Norway's Nord University, calls it a political blessing to have the prime minister leading tree-planting, but argues the scale has outpaced the systems needed to make it work on the ground. Too often, he says, the emphasis is on getting vast numbers of seedlings into the earth rather than tending them afterwards — you cannot expect a baby to grow if you do not care for it.
The government's defenders counter that the campaign is paired with practical guidance: forestry and farming experts move from farm to farm advising smallholders how deep to plant, how to conserve soil with structures like bunds, and how to manage forests rather than cut them. And there is encouraging new evidence. A 2026 study of more than 44,500 seedlings planted under the Green Legacy Initiative in southern Ethiopia in 2023 found about 80 percent had survived — with markedly higher rates among older seedlings, wet-season plantings, and seedlings whose planters had received training in best planting practices. The lesson is clear: training and timing matter as much as volume.
