Could planting a trillion trees stop global heating? This man thinks so

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In 2017, Yishan Wong was ready to retire in Hawaii after leaving behind his career in Silicon Valley. The CEO of Reddit until 2014, Wong had previously held senior positions at Facebook and PayPal. But then came what he calls the “moment” when he decided he was going to take on the climate crisis instead.

“I was literally on a beach trying to retire, and it was too hot,” he said. Temperatures in Hawaii at the time were abnormally high, and he thought: “The planet has a climate change problem. I need to solve it.”

Wong started looking for “the most cost-effective per unit way” of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. After digging into climate science papers, he settled on his solution: trees.

In 2019, he founded Terraformation, with the aim to help reforest 3bn acres of degraded land around the world – an area bigger than the US – which Wong estimates could hold a trillion trees. He believes these forests could absorb enough CO2 to halt global heating.

Reaching net zero by 2050 means drastically reducing emissions, but to achieve this goal within such a short timeframe, and keep global heating within 1.5C, means also figuring out how to remove carbon from the atmosphere. An estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change envisions the removal of 730bn metric tons of CO2 this century.

Carbon-removal technology – sucking carbon from the air and then storing or using it – is one way to do this but is expensive and will take time to scale up. The International Energy Agency estimates that these technologies absorb about 40m metric tons of carbon a year. Trees, on the other hand, collectively absorb about 7.6bn metric tons a year – more than the annual emissions of the US – even after accounting for the emissions released by deforestation, wildfires and other causes.

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