ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Business is booming on the small patch of land where Eyasu Debela and four friends run a store by the side of the road selling tree seedlings for people to plant.The stock in their tree nursery on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, spans more than 15 varieties, from avocado and mango to olive and rosemary, and shoppers are flocking in as people in Africa’s second-most populous nation embrace one of the largest tree-planting campaigns the world has ever seen.“People are encouraged to plant seedlings.So many of them come to us,” Debela, 29, told NBC News last month.
Ethiopia’s rainy season between June and September is the busiest period, when radio, television and flyers urge people to plant trees across the country, he added.A tree nursery on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.Courtesy of Samuel AbateLaunched by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in 2019, the Green Legacy Initiative has turned tree planting into a national obsession, mobilizing tens of millions of Ethiopians in a drive toward 50 billion trees by 2030.The government says it has already planted more than 48 billion, including a single-day record of over 800 million seedlings in August.The campaign exists to confront a problem decades in the making: deforestation, eroding soil and a warming climate have left soil that no longer holds water, leading to crop failure and, in the worst cases, deadly landslides.Officials call it one of the most ambitious restoration efforts on Earth, and there are signs that degraded land is recovering as forest cover climbs for the first time in generations.
But experts caution that mass tree-planting schemes don’t always deliver what they promise, while the country is also wrestling with the impacts of conflict and climate change.A woman walks past a large mural in Agaro depicting Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in May, above.Ahmed's office temporarily transformed into a garden before the launch of the G...