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Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend who has a small business doing, well I actually have no clue what the English word for it is, but its direct translation would be “Nature Nursing/Care taking”. A descriptive translation would be something like a wild nature gartner.

I asked him and he said it would be little trouble to plant that many seedlings if you coordinates the efforts and planned for it.

He also told me that these stunts, like airlines planting a lot of trees to go carbon neutral, often ends up with a lot of dead trees. Because the hard part isn’t planting trees it’s making sure they survive the first five years.

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> Because the hard part isn’t planting trees it’s making sure they survive the first five years.

Which is interesting because the article already mentions a lack of water resources:

>> as Ethiopians heeded Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s ambitious plan to roll back years of drought and scanty rains that the United Nations says has left some 3.8 million people in immediate need for assistance.

Won't these new trees demand a lot of water?

It's important to remember that the water used by trees is not necessarily zero sum. Trees shade the ground reducing evaporation; they contribute to soil structure increasing the soils ability to hold water; they break hard-pan layers allowing more water to seep into the ground during rain-fail events etc.

Check this out as well: forests attract rain! So if they can manage to keep a forest healthy it should help improve the local climate rain patterns and increase rainfall.[1]

1. Https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/59/4/341/346941

https://www.sthelenaisland.info/the-millennium-forest/

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11137903

That's after they grow up though, right?

That’s interesting I wasn’t aware of that. I guess trees are different than agriculture.

Now that is interesting. What are the challenges for making sure the trees survive the first five years? Do you have any knowledge you can help to elaborate?

As I understand it, it’s a range of things. Water and protection from animals, as other mentioned, is a big part of it. But so is growth speed, most trees grow rather slow, but grass, weeds and shrubbery doesn’t. This means that seedlings can lose the struggle for sunlight if you don’t “now the lawn” around them.

There is also quality of the seedlings. The best example is kitchen herbs. If you buy some rosemary in a pot at you local supermarket, it’ll taste fine. It’ll probably also survive long enough for you to eat it. If you try to plant it in your garden with the intention of keeping rosemary around for years, then there is a good chance it’ll have died within its first month. That’s because supermarket herbs are mass produced in safe environments, where long term survival isn’t valued. You could get lucky, but you’d have a much higher rate of success if you buy your rosemary from a grower who grew them to be planted outside. This is both slower and more expensive though.

Getting 350 million seedlings, often as cheap as you can, is easier with the mass-production approach, and that’s typically what these projects do.

My assumption is making sure they get enough water.

Perhaps also not get eaten by herbivores, not damaged by bigger animals, humans and vehicles and protected from insects.

All valid points, but Ethiopia is a dry mountainous country next to other dry countries. It already has a track record for droughts and famines. Proper irrigation probably the #1 problem.

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